Docker at Age 2 Reaches Out Far Beyond Its Roots

by Sean Michael Kerner

Among Docker’s biggest supporters is IBM which announced the IBM Containers Docker-based service in December 2014.

Amazon is also a backer of Docker and supports the container virtualization technology across multiple products, including the EC2 Container Service and the Elastic Beanstalk.

Docker represents a different form of virtualization from what VMware has offered. Yet VMware doesn’t see the two technologies as being competitive. At the VMworld conference in August 2014, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said, “The best way to deliver containers is through a virtual machine.”

While Docker has grown organically, it has also grown via acquisitions, including Orchard in October 2014, and both SocketPlane and Kitematic in March 2015.

Google is also a big backer of Docker and has created the open-source Kubernetes project as a technology that enables container management.

CoreOS started out as an optimized clustered operating system for the deployment of Docker containers. In December 2014, CoreOS started its own Rocker container effort, which it hopes to use to replace Docker in the near future.

RancherOS is another optimized Linux operating system option for Docker containers, which was first announced in November 2014.

Red Hat is another key player in the Docker marketplace, and Docker containers can run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat has also created a Docker-optimized version of its platform with Project Atomic.

Among the complementary technologies that enhance Docker is ClusterHQ’s open-source Flocker project, which aims to solve the data management challenge. Flocker is a lightweight volume and container manager that developers can use to define their application as a set of connected Docker containers.

CenturyLink announced its Panamax Docker virtualization management technology in August 2014. “Panamax is the maximum shipping container size for a container to go through the Panama Canal; so it created standards for shipping containers,” Lucas Carlson, chief innovation officer at CenturyLink told eWEEK when Panamax launched. “We are trying to create application standards for Dockerized apps.”

Docker is also being used to enable the emerging trend of DevOps in multiple ways. Shippable uses Docker as the foundation of its continuous integration platform that developers can use to build and test code.