Patent attributes
A service control system manages a set of containers operating within one or more computing hosts. Containers may access a consistent runtime environment regardless which cloud provider the computing hosts come from. Each computing host also runs a control plane agent that interacts with the service control system to provide a set of services to the containers on the computing host and connect the containers to an overlay network of the service control system. The service control system thus may provide networking, firewall, storage, and load balancing services to the various containers. This permits a set of heterogeneous computing hosts to provide consistent services regardless of the underlying computing resources and containers that are managed by the service control system.