Portainer's managed services team designs, builds, and operates your industrial Kubernetes and Docker container fleets alongside your engineers, so plant IT and OT leads get production-ready, governed operations across every site without having to become distributed systems specialists themselves.
Most industrial container deployments begin with good intentions and a working pilot, then the responsibility for keeping that fleet running lands on whichever plant IT or automation engineer happened to set it up, alongside their actual job. The gap between "it works in the pilot" and "it's still working, patched and governed, at 40 sites three years from now" is where the risk accumulates.
A handful of patterns show up in nearly every industrial fleet that grows past a pilot. Architecture responsibility lands on small teams: designing a container estate that has to run reliably across dozens or hundreds of sites, most of them unstaffed, demands expertise most plant IT teams were never resourced to build. Upgrades and drift create ongoing anxiety, because every version update or configuration change at a remote site carries the risk of a truck roll if it goes wrong, and drift accumulates fastest exactly where nobody is watching closely. Key-person dependency becomes a safety issue rather than just a support inconvenience, since the departure of the one engineer who understands the fleet's architecture can leave a production line or an OT device unsupported and unpatched. And for most industrial teams, containers are a requirement, not a differentiator: adoption is usually driven by an ISV's application shipping that way, or a modernization mandate, not a strategic goal of building an internal platform engineering practice.
Most industrial teams do not want to build a container platform engineering function from scratch. They want stable, governed operations across every site, so engineering time goes to the plant, not to the platform underneath it.
Every managed engagement runs through Portainer as the governance layer, so your team keeps full visibility into every device, every change and every deployment, whether or not a Portainer engineer is actively working your fleet that day.
Portainer Managed Services extend your team rather than replace it. Your engineers keep ownership and visibility of the fleet; ours bring the operational patterns that come from running containerized estates across regulated, distributed and resource-constrained environments.
Full fleet visibility stays with your OT and IT teams. Centralized governance, audit logging and RBAC run through Portainer at every site, and there is no dependency on a black-box external service or a vendor's private tooling to know what is running where.
Real-world experience with container failure modes at industrial scale, a focus on reliability across sites with no on-site technical staff, and operational patterns built for environments where container operations are a cost center, not the core business.
Managed services cover the full lifecycle of an industrial container fleet, from first architecture through years of day-to-day operation across every site.
Production-ready KubeSolo, Docker and Podman architecture designed around your actual site count, device mix and connectivity constraints, not a generic reference deployment.
Implementation using patterns proven across distributed edge fleets, with Portainer configured as the central governance and management layer from day one.
Day-2 operations across every site, covering version upgrades, configuration drift remediation and ongoing guidance that reduces risk without requiring a site visit for every change.
Your OT and plant IT teams build operational confidence at a sustainable pace, with knowledge transferred progressively rather than expecting them to become container specialists overnight.
Collaboration with the ISVs and internal teams publishing applications to your fleet, so Compose stacks and Helm charts land correctly against a Portainer-governed platform instead of causing deployment friction.
Platform SLAs and SLOs are defined and reported against, so plant leadership gets a measurable commitment on fleet uptime and patch currency, not an anecdotal sense of platform health.
Organizations choose the engagement level that matches where their container operations maturity is today, not where they eventually want to be.
Fractional senior platform engineer support for teams building early operational maturity across their industrial fleet who aren't ready for full managed operations. Includes SLA and SLO definition, help building or extending the fleet platform around Portainer, including observability and alerting, support getting ISV and internal deployments configured correctly against the platform, and reactive engineering support while your team builds confidence.
A fractional platform engineering team for environments where the container fleet is safety- or production-critical and full L3/L4 ownership is required. Includes everything in Platform Plus, plus on-call support with 8x5, 24x7, 1-hour or 4-hour response SLA options, proactive engineering with preventative maintenance across the fleet, emergency incident response to restore service within the agreed SLA, root cause analysis and post-mortems after any interruption, and automation plus disaster recovery testing.
Managed services are built for organizations that need production container operations to be stable, supportable and sustained for years, not a proof of concept.
Running or preparing to run containers across distributed sites without the internal expertise to operate them confidently; a small or overstretched OT or IT team already stretched across too many responsibilities; container adoption driven by an ISV's application requirements rather than a strategic platform engineering goal; wanting the outcomes of a platform engineering function without hiring and retaining a full team.
Teams that want unmanaged, DIY container operations, or a purely experimental pilot with no production stakes. If the fleet is not yet running anything that matters to the business, this service is not the right starting point.
KubeSolo, Docker and Podman, the same three runtimes the Portainer platform manages from a single interface. Engagement scope is set to match your actual fleet, whether that's a single runtime or a mixed fleet across sites and device types.
No. Every engagement runs through Portainer as the governance layer, so your team retains full visibility, audit logging and RBAC regardless of which tier you choose, and regardless of whether a Portainer engineer is actively engaged on a given day.
Platform Enterprise includes 8x5, 24x7, 1-hour or 4-hour response SLA options, matched to which parts of your fleet are safety- or production-critical and which aren't.
Yes. Both tiers cover Docker and Podman fleets as well as KubeSolo, and many industrial engagements start on Docker alone, with KubeSolo introduced later where a site's hardware and workload justify it.
No. Managed services extend your team rather than replace it. Your engineers keep ownership and day-to-day visibility of the fleet through Portainer; ours bring the operational depth to keep it stable, upgraded and audit-ready across every site.
Talk to our managed services team about your sites, your runtimes, and where your operational risk actually sits.