What is a helper container?

Question

When creating a new service, you can add "third-party containers" to it. What is a helper container? And how does it differ from a “normal” service container?

Answer 1

TL; DR: Sidekicks are regular services, except that the dns resolution between the "main" service and sidekicks is automatically enabled and that the container package scales the same and is deployed on the same machines.

According to the Rancher v1.3 Documentation :

Rancher supports the scaling of colocation, scheduling and lock step of a set of services, allowing users to group these services using the concept of sidekicks

Besides,

When defining a sidekick for a service, you do not need to bind services , as third-party subscribers automatically