Salad Container Engine (SCE)

Containers provide a portable and immutable format for packaging, deploying, and managing cloud-native applications at scale. Salad Container Engine (SCE) offers fully managed container orchestration, dynamically distributes workloads to optimal hardware cohorts in accordance with technical requirements, and features 3D-accelerated GPU processing on every available node instance.

It's the fastest, simplest, and most affordable way to run containerized workloads—without managing virtual machines or underlying compute infrastructure.

Supported Workflows

Salad Container Engine is designed to integrate into your existing workflows. Salad support both a UI to manually setup your deployments as well as a fully featured API when you are ready for a deeper integration.

Defining Workloads

In the Salad Container Engine lexicon, container deployments are known as Container Groups. Each Container Group represents a set of "identical" Container Instances that each run on dedicated hardware.

Container Groups

A Container Group is defined as a container image, the required hardware resources, and a predetermined number of replicas to be maintained at any given time.

Container Groups can be used to ensure that a specified number of identical containers are running across the Salad network. Once a Container Group has been defined, Salad Container Engine automatically creates or purges Container Instances as needed to reach the desired replica count.

Container Groups can be created, started, stopped, or scaled via the Salad API, giving you direct control over your workloads before and after deployment.

Container Instances

A Container Instance represents a single instantiation of a container on a dedicated host connected to the Salad network. Each time a container is deployed to a Salad machine node, a new Container Instance is created with a unique id and discrete logs.

Compute Environment

Salad leverages hardware-native virtualization and industry-standard container runtimes to standardize the compute environment across a distributed network of heterogeneous hardware.

Once a container image has been deployed, Salad Container Engine instantiates replicas on a predetermined number of available physical devices as stateless processes within virtual Linux subsystems.

Host Environment

All SCE container instances deploy to consumer-owned hardware running modern Windows NT operating systems (Windows 10 or later). This requirement allows the Salad desktop client to leverage Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization features, manage and monitor workloads, and boot true Linux kernels from the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2).

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Supported Containers
Currently, SCE supports Linux containers on AMD64 (also commonly known as x86-64). Container image manifests must be Docker compliant (e.g. Docker image manifest v1 or v2).

Stateless Execution

Active SCE container instances are treated as stateless workloads. Whenever the virtual execution context closes (through downscaling, batch job termination, or failure), the container image is purged from the host machine's local memory. While running, the Salad container orchestrator uses heartbeat monitoring to assess potential interruptions or other failures, and determine when and how best to dynamically fail over to another dedicated node with 100% actual resource availability.

Open-source Dependencies

Salad incorporates time-tested and incrementally developed tooling for reliable performance and replicable results. The SaladCloud API conforms to OpenAPI specifications and generates templates in various coding languages to facilitate testing and development. When deployed from SCTL or the SaladCloud Portal, SCE container instances are automatically executed in the latest stable version of the open-source containerd container runtime.

Use Cases

Salad's affordable infrastructure is as versatile as your imagination. Here are just a few examples of what you can build with Salad Container Engine (SCE):

proxy video-streaming requests for virtual private networks
conduct long-running data processing queues
execute hyper-threaded, parallelized workloads
distribute 3D rendering or VFX queues
procedurally-generated mapping simulations
access low-latency servers for P2P gaming

Additional Considerations

Developers interested in using Salad Container Engine should be aware of these additional considerations.

Cold-start Overhead

If the Windows Subsystem for Linux utility is not installed on the best available host machine, the Salad Bowl daemon must install it before running container workloads within Salad's Linux distribution. This design pattern can introduce modest overhead in terms of cold-start time, but should not impact performance or reliability.

Data-sensitivity Compliance

Customers in specialized industries may be legally obligated to protect sensitive data such as medical records or private financial information. While Salad takes precautions to secure every workload on our network, we cannot guarantee that our solutions are considered compliant with requirements outlined by select regulatory commissions or legislative authorities (including but not limited to HIPAA and the Financial Modernization Act of 1999).

Scaling Container Groups

While Salad Container Engine does maintain a stable replica count within a given Container Group, SCE deployments do not currently auto-scale Container Groups based on performance. Container Groups must be scaled up or down on demand through the Portal, or by direct request via the Salad API.