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AUSTIN, Texas—The second day of DockerCon 17 was all about enterprise adoption and what it takes to run containers in production, with Docker Inc. announcing the debut of a new service offering to modernize traditional applications here on April 18.
“Enterprise customers have come to Docker asking how they can get started with microservices,” Docker Chief Operating Officer Scott Johnston told eWEEK.
Johnston said Docker has worked with partners including Avanade, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Microsoft to define a proscriptive fixed time and price professional services program to help organizations figure out a microservices strategy.
“It’s a bundled offering that includes professional services, Docker Enterprise Edition [EE] software and hybrid cloud infrastructure from our partners,” Johnston said. “In approximately five days, we can take a typical legacy application, containerize it and put it under Docker EE management on modern infrastructure providing higher efficiency.”
Johnston said a legacy app can be moved to a microservices container model without going back to source code or rewriting an application. The whole process of moving a legacy application to a modern containerized application can be an operations-driven program, he said.
“We’re able to demonstrate that by containerizing an application; we can give legacy applications portability and improved security,” Johnston said. “Modernization is also about making apps cloud ready so they can be moved to a public or private cloud.”
There are also security benefits to moving to a container model. Containers have a reduced attack surface, providing an inherently improved security profile, Johnston said. In addition, with Docker, every update can be cryptographically signed to further improve security integrity.
Oracle Comes to Docker
Among the other DockerCon Day 2 announcements was that Oracle is now bringing some of its software applications to the Docker Store. The Docker Store, which officially launched in March, is a location for enterprises to buy certified container applications.
“We think this is a milestone not only for Oracle and Docker but also for how the industry deploys software,” Ben Golub, CEO of Docker, said during the Day 2 keynote.
Oracle is bringing its suite of software including Oracle database, WebLogic Servers and the Java Development Kit (JDK) to the Docker Store. Johnston said Oracle’s move to the Docker Store is not directly related to modernizing the traditional applications effort. That said, he noted that Oracle did engage with Docker Inc. to understand and learn the best practices for packaging apps as containers and listing them on the Docker Store. The Oracle apps are free to download and for development use, with Oracle making money when customers need enterprise support.