If you don’t mind a little beta testing, you can get your hands on Rackspace’s Carina container service for free as of today. The company said the new service will allow you to create managed clusters for running containers in the cloud using OpenStack technology, at the OpenStack Summit going on now in Tokyo.

Rackspace said Carina is an easy-to-use and instant-on native container environment built on Docker Swarm and Docker Engine technology. Carina allows customers to create and deploy clusters for their containerized applications faster than they can on their own. As a “zero infrastructure” environment, Rackspace manages the infrastructure and Docker environment on behalf of its clients.

Quicker Cluster Design and Deployment

Carina aims to offer developers a quick way to design and deploy clusters for containerized apps. According to Rackspace, container technology is one of the fastest-growing software development tools in the computing industry today. The technology offers multiple benefits, including improved application portability across development, test and production environments.

Containers consume a fraction of the compute resources of typical virtual machines, allowing for near-instant availability, application scaling and increased application density, allowing customers to save time and money.

“Carina makes it fast and simple to start a Docker Swarm cluster,” Nick Stinemates, VP business development of Docker Inc., said in a blog post. “You can get started in under a minute and pull images into a cluster straight from Docker Hub, or leverage existing Docker tools and plugins. This is exciting as it builds on and partners with our existing community and ecosystem. The focus on container developer experience is paramount and they’re showing a commitment to it.”

Bare Metal Performance, Virtual Machine Price

One of Carina’s chief selling points is that it allows users to deploy containers on top of bare metal servers. Bare metal servers can provide considerable performance benefits over virtual machines. However, they require the addition of large increments of capacity because it’s not easy to share them. As a result, users are required to add new full servers whenever they want to increase their capacity, which is why most cloud providers base their services on virtualization.

Carina offers users the speed of bare metal servers with the flexibility to increment capacity offered by virtualization, the company noted. In the beta, users will be able to use bare metal containers isolated by additional security measures. In the future, Rackspace said clients will be able to run other types of container clusters such as virtual machines or full bare metal hosts.

Rackspace also said it would eventually be announcing support for OpenStack Magnum API for Carina, which will allow developers to use existing APIs for their containers, rather than learning a new, proprietary API. At the moment, the Corina beta is only available to customers in the U.S., but will likely become generally available sometime next year.