Docker Makes Containers More Portable With New Networking Stack, Adds Plug-In Support.
Shipping containers revolutionized the way freight is moved around the world. Docker, the startup responsible for accelerating the container technology revolution, is making several announcements at its DockerCon conference in San Francisco this week — and several other companies are taking the event as opportunity to make announcements, too.
Amazon Web Services, Apcera, Cisco, CoreOS, Docker, EMC, Fujitsu Limited, Goldman Sachs, Google, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Joyent, Linux Foundation, Mesosphere, Microsoft, Pivotal, Rancher Labs, Red Hat and VMware create standards around container format and runtimeDocker to donate container format, runtime code and specifications to Project SAN FRANCISCO, Jun 22, 2015 (BUSINESS WIRE) — A broad coalition of industry leaders and users are joining forces to create the Open Container Project (OCP), chartered to establish common standards for software containers.ARMONK, N.Y. and SAN FRANCISCO, June 22, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — DockerCon — Today IBM (NYSE: IBM) is announcing the delivery of industry leading enterprise class containers, that make it easier for clients to deliver production applications across their hybrid environments.
By making it possible to pack all manner of cargo in a uniform way, shipping companies save money and streamline the process of loading and unloading goods. A startup called Portworx is bringing the concept of software-defined storage to increasingly popular Linux container technology for packaging up application code.
Housed under the Linux Foundation, the OCP’s mission is to enable users and companies to continue to innovate and develop container-based solutions, with confidence that their pre-existing development efforts will be protected and without industry fragmentation. But it only worked because the size and shape of shipping containers are standardized, ensuring smooth transitions the trains hauling containers across the country to the boats designed to carry the containers across the ocean. IBM Containers, based on Docker and built on Bluemix, IBM’s platform-as-a-service, provide a more efficient environment that enables faster integration and access to analytics, big data and security services. The highlight of today’s product releases is a new Docker networking stack that now allows developers to take their networked Docker containers from one platform to another without having to recreate the network. Docker may have become synonymous with containers, but it’s not the only container format around and not everybody agrees that it should become the standard format.
VMware today announced a technology preview of Project Bonneville, a runtime that will allow companies that have invested in VMware’s vSphere virtualization software to run applications packaged up in Docker containers inside of virtual machines. The leadership of the Application Container spec (“appc”) initiative, including founding member CoreOS, will also be bringing their technical leadership and support to OCP.
Enterprises will now be able to use the combination of IBM, Docker, Cloud Foundry and OpenStack to create a new generation of portable distributed applications. To a large degree, this new feature is the result of Docker’s acquisition of SocketPlane earlier this year and the feedback Docker has been getting from its networking partners.
They make it far easier to move applications from the individual laptops and workstations where they are coded to the vast clusters of computers that serve those applications to customers. Project Bonneville allows engineers to choose containers from the Docker Hub and then run them inside virtual machines, thanks to a feature in vSphere called Instant Clone. “The pure approach Bonneville takes is that the container a VM, and the VM a container,” VMware senior software engineer Ben Corrie wrote in a blog post about the project. “There is no distinction, no encapsulation, and no in-guest virtualization. The container movement has gained immense popularity among users because of the promise of portability, agility and interoperability across a broad set of infrastructures and tools.
At the time, Docker and CoreOS looked like they were on a collision course, and having even more container formats wasn’t likely going to help the overall ecosystem. Containers should be empowered with advanced capabilities allowing production applications to be deployed and managed with ease, giving developers the freedom to focus on innovation.
The company’s senior vice president of product, Scott Johnston, told me the idea is to do to networking what Docker already did for compute. “We are super excited to bring the portability that Docker brought to containers to the networking level,” Johnston said. With this, developers now have the ability to take not just the containers with their apps and move them between providers, but to also preserve the networking setup that connected all of these containers during these moves. “By bringing SDN directly to the application itself and into the hands of the developers, Docker is driving multi-container application portability throughout the application development lifecycle,” said Solomon Hykes, CTO and chief architect of Docker. “Individual developers, through a single command, can establish the topology of the network to connect discrete Dockerized services into a distributed application.
By bringing the two companies together, the open source community aims to avoid compatibility nightmares that can arise when competitors offer similar products. Google has made a few tweaks to Container Engine, which relies on the Google-led Kubernetes open-source container management software, which can deploy containers onto multiple public clouds. As part of the new Project, Docker will donate both draft specifications and its existing code around an image format and container runtime to serve as cornerstone technologies under the governance of the OCP. The company is also working with Amazon to provide a native cluster management to AWS users and to optimize scheduling containerized applications on Amazon’s EC2 service. Software containers have been around for years, but the idea caught fire when Docker released its tool set, also called Docker, for creating containers.
And now there are prices for Container Engine: 15 cents per hour for “standard” clusters with as many as 100 virtual machine nodes and managed uptime. With these technologies as a base for its initiatives, the OCP can have evolved standards and specifications that are rooted in practical usage, code that has been used broadly in production and the collective experience of a large community of users and developers. As a unique reseller of the Docker Trusted Registry, IBM is the first to fully integrate the on-premise Docker Trusted Registry software with its flagship DevOPs and Cloud offerings, beginning with IBM UrbanCode and IBM Pure Application Systems.
The strength of Docker has always been about getting the community to join forces and avoid fragmentation.” I also asked Google’s Cloud Platform product manager Craig McLuckie what he thought about this new initiative. The OCP will manage the transition of the technology from an “insider” standard into an open industry standard, providing for its continued evolution. The Docker project will continue to maintain the Docker client, all platform tooling and all Docker orchestration capabilities that are built on top of the donated technologies. The DevOps support of IBM Containers enable enterprises to build, automate and orchestrate the deployment of multi-platform, multi-container and traditional workloads together in application environments. It’s worth noting that Docker’s business model in the long run isn’t so much bound to a container format but instead is about building tools for managing container deployments.
Docker has also worked with ClusterHQ, which specializes in container data management, and is probably best known for its Flocker tool to support their storage volumes. Mindjet taps Bluemix for rapid application development using IBM Containers Mindjet is a late-stage startup known best for Spigit, a crowdsourcing platform for innovation with hundreds of large enterprise customers and over 4 million users.
With today’s update, Docker is also introducing a rapid-release channel that will give developers the option to always run the latest (and potentially buggy) release of the company’s tools. With annual growth of over 30%, the Spigit team saw operations costs increases and scaling limitations of its existing infrastructure, slowing Mindjet’s pace of innovation and limiting its capacity to add new users. As Docker also announced today, the team has decided to spin out a lot of the ‘plumbing’ — that is many of the non-core tools the team has built around its services. Mindjet also used the IBM Bluemix Garage team to incorporate several DevOps services into their operations achieving seamless integration and controlled production deployment.
In 2013, Cisco, Brocade, Microsoft and several others teamed up to create Open Daylight, an organization dedicated to a standard open source platform for the next generation of networking technologies. The OCP and its members will work together to build a standard that ensures container formats and runtime are based on a core set of values that includes openness, security, portability, composability, minimalism and backward compatibility. World class support of Docker-based containers is a high priority for enterprise clients who want to leverage containers with production applications. Several others have followed, including the Internet of Things group AllSeen Alliance, the drone tech group Dronecode, and a group dedicating to liberating the popular programming platform Node.js from corporate control. And with Docker’s Swarm open-source project, “the multi-container application can be immediately networked across multiple hosts and can communicate seamlessly across a cluster of machines with a single command,” according to a statement.
Within three months, the parties aim to complete creating the Project, migrating code and publishing a draft specification building on the technology donated by Docker. Containers have proved to be effective in a number of enterprises in industries such as financial services, hospitality, retail, healthcare, cloud service providers and others. Further detail on the effort and a copy of the OCP’s charter can be found at www.opencontainers.org. “Apcera empowers businesses to securely run any containerized workload — including Docker images — in production across hybrid cloud environments, by applying consistent security and policy. IBM total cloud revenue—covering public, private and hybrid engagements—was $7.7 billion over the previous 12 months at the end of March 2015; it grew more than 60 percent in first quarter 2015. We believe this is important for the industry to accelerate the use and deployment of containers and micro-services,” said Dave Ward, chief architect and CTO of engineering, Cisco. “We look forward to the emerging developer community to further support container management, tooling and applications that will benefit users and integrate with other communities to be a common architectural building block.” “CoreOS, when we started the App Container spec (appc) our goal was to have a well-designed software container specification that is modular, portable across platforms and is secure,” said Alex Polvi, co-founder and CEO of CoreOS. “An open, well-defined specification is required for the overall success and adoption of containers.
There’s also some resemblance to Mozilla’s Firefox Nightly browser releases, Microsoft’s Windows Insider program, and Google’s Chrome OS operating system. We are excited to help launch and support the OCP effort as the risk of overly fragmented technology will only slow down the adoption by our customers. To learn more, visit http://www.mindjet.com/spigitengage/ To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ibm-delivers-docker-based-container-services-for-enterprise-cloud-application-developers-300102617.html
Docker, Inc. (formely known as dotCloud) is the company behind the open-source Docker project and the growing Docker ecosystem of people, products, platforms, and partners revolutionizing the way code is built, packaged, and deployed. … read more » The standardization and open governance nature of this initiative will help to attract more talents and organizations to participate, which will in turn stimulate innovations in various layers, while still keeping the core to stay consolidated.“ “With enterprise-ready container services available for our clients, IBM has been and continues to be an early adopter and supporter of Docker’s container services,” said Dr.