Docker, the container technology that finally made it, is the hot tech topic of 2015. Although container technology is more than a decade old, Docker has been the key to gaining industry-wide support by paving the road to cloud portability for the masses.
It is not often that Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Red Hat, Rackspace and Salesforce all pledge their support for one technology.
Docker made a number of announcements at the recent DockerCon conference in Amsterdam. They talked about introducing platform services for orchestrating multi-container distributed applications and are implementing this via three new services – Docker Machine, Docker Swarm, and Docker Compose.
Docker Hub Enterprise (DHE) was also announced – the new product addition for distributed applications that deliver private repositories which can then access official Docker repos and the myriad of Dockerized services that exist in the Docker hub. DHE sits behind the firewall thus opening up Docker to many enterprises who can’t work in the public cloud. Read more.
New products and services related to container technology:
Jelastic Announces Docker Integration to Provide the Most Advanced Orchestrated Application Delivery Jelastic, Inc (the first company to combine unlimited PaaS and IaaS into one solution), announced their integration with Docker using Parallels Cloud Server. The collaboration will allow service providers to enable continuous application delivery, fully elastic scalability and integrated orchestration that combines Docker’s application delivery approach with Parallels containers, fully managed via Jelastic PaaS.
Last week IBM and Docker Announced a Strategic Partnership to Deliver Enterprise Applications in the Cloud and On Prem
Enterprises can use the combination of IBM and Docker to create and manage a new generation of portable distributed applications that are rapidly composed of discrete interoperable Docker containers, have a dynamic lifecycle, and can scale to run in concert anywhere from the developer’s laptop to hundreds of hosts in the cloud.
New Windows Server Containers and Azure Support for Docker
Microsoft Azure added support for Docker containers on Linux VMs, enabling the broad ecosystem of Dockerized Linux applications to run within Azure.
CenturyLink recently announced the release of their Docker management tool – Panamax.
This tool provides developers a powerful management platform where they can create, share, and deploy even the most complex Docker applications.
For more reading, the articles below may help to answers to those burning questions about what Docker means to the future of cloud computing –
Rightscale Cloud Management blog – Docker vs. VMs? Combining Both for Cloud Portability Nirvana
Gigaom Research blog – Is Docker a Threat to the Cloud Ecosystem?
CoreOS is offering up some friendly competition for Docker fans:
Infoworld Tech Watch – What’s CoreOS? An Existential Threat to Linux Vendors
While sometimes dismissed as the newest entrant in the “just enough operating system” pageant, CoreOS threatens to displace incumbent Linux distributions with a minimalist approach that seeks to emulate how Google and other Web companies manage distributed systems. CoreOS uses Docker to handle the addition and management of applications and services on a system.
InformationWeek – Rocket Challenges Docker on Cloud Containers
Linux distributor CoreOS is challenging Docker as the preeminent container format for applications, with its new Rocket container runtime. The emergence of this Docker alternative is a sign of how important containers have become for IT and cloud production environments. In the long run, both Docker and CoreOS’s Rocket are likely to be around for a long time — and play distinctive roles.
We’ll see how far into 2015 the container craze continues.
