MULTI-TENANT, HIGH-DENSITY CONTAINER SERVICE FOR HOSTING STATEFUL AND STATELESS MIDDLEWARE COMPONENTS

A container service is capable of hosting large numbers of middleware components for multiple tenants. A central container manager controls a plurality of compute nodes. The central container manager receives middleware components from external devices or services and assigns the components to containers on one or more designated compute nodes. Each compute node has a container management agent and one or more containers. The container management agents activate and manage the appropriate number of containers to run the assigned middleware components. The container management agent assigns each container on its compute node a limited set of privileges to control access to shared resources. The central container manager and each node's container management agent monitor container load levels and dynamically adjust the placement of the middleware components to maintain balanced operation. The compute nodes are grouped into clusters based upon the type of middleware components hosted on each compute node.