SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Docker, which maintains the open platform for distributed applications, today announced a significant expansion of its “batteries included but swappable” ecosystem to include over thirty working and proposed partner and community integrations. This ecosystem growth coincides with the first downloadable versions of its orchestration tools – Machine Beta, Swarm Beta and Compose 1.1 – announced in December 2014 at DockerCon EU. The comprehensive set of orchestration capabilities is designed to empower developers and sysadmins to create and manage a new generation of 100 percent portable distributed applications. Seamless application portability in this context means that an individual developer can leverage the same orchestration tooling as the apps are built and shipped from dev to build to test.
Moreover, application portability is about the operational freedom to run dockerized applications on any infrastructure from a laptop, to a physical machine or VM in a datacenter to a cloud, and from one cloud to another. Organizations are now demanding this flexibility to avoid lock-in to a specific infrastructure. In turn, infrastructure players and cloud providers are building differentiated services to attract those who are developing dockerized distributed applications. This rapidly expanding ecosystem includes industry leaders Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, IBM, Joyent, Mesosphere, Microsoft and VMware.
“Distributed applications are dynamically evolving and in constant motion which is why Docker orchestration uniquely covers application portability at all phases of the application development lifecycle,” said Solomon Hykes, chief architect of the Docker Project. “I’m excited to share with the community the growing validation of our model by providing great collaborations that ensure complete freedom of choice in how and where these multi-container, multi-host applications are being built, shipped and run.”
Docker Machine is the part of Docker orchestration that enables developers and sysadmins to go from “zero to Docker” with one portable command that works uniformly across infrastructures. The command accomplishes two automated tasks at once: it provisions the “host infrastructure” (e.g. VM for a Docker Engine) then installs that Engine. For the beta release of Docker Machine, the following twelve drivers are now available: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Digital Ocean, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Softlayer, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Hyper-V, OpenStack, Rackspace Cloud, VirtualBox, VMware Fusion®, VMware vCloud® Air™, and VMware vSphere®. As a result, developers and sysadmins have a breadth of options for porting their applications to infrastructure that is optimized for rapid provisioning and installation of Docker. In addition, the community has generated ten other pull requests for incremental drivers and is encouraging submissions for others.
Docker Swarm provides native clustering as well as integrations with third party tools and services. This ensures a uniform developer experience at any scale, as developers build and ship multi-container, multi-host distributed applications, while preserving the operational freedom to choose an infrastructure optimized for the performance and availability of these applications.
Swarm’s native clustering and scheduling capabilities can scale with the application development lifecycle from one laptop to spanning hundreds of hosts in production. Swarm’s scheduling capabilities determine the right host in a cluster for specific containers, assigns the right resources, and leverages Docker Hub for its host discovery.
Swarm supports a “batteries included but swappable” approach that allows for partner integrations that replace and enhance Swarm’s capabilities. Integration partners hook into Swarm APIs to create value-added capabilities under Docker, while maintaining a uniform Docker experience for developers. The Swarm API supports alternative implementations of container scheduling and host discovery. The beta version of Swarm supports host discovery drivers for ZooKeeper, Consul and etcd.
Swarm integrates with third-party container orchestration products as well as with orchestration services offered by cloud providers. Mesosphere and Docker have collaborated to develop reference implementations for Apache Mesos and the Mesosphere Datacenter Operating System (DCOS), which are the first integrations available. Integrations are planned for Amazon EC2 Container Service, IBM Bluemix Container Service, Joyent Smart Data Center and Microsoft Azure. The express purpose of these integrations is to ensure distributed application portability across any infrastructure, while providing operations teams the flexibility to leverage existing tools or select the Docker-based partner infrastructure that they believe is best optimized for their specific application.
“Docker is working with the community to take the next steps to develop an orchestration services ecosystem that will help developers rapidly compose distributed applications from containers,” said Angel Diaz, vice president, Cloud Technology and Architecture at IBM. “IBM is committed to continuing to work with Docker and the community to evolve this technology supported by an open governance model. This work will help better define open APIs and provide the industry with the means to combine multiple orchestration technologies and accelerate the adoption of containers for enterprise applications.”
“Our customers want one powerful and easy to use solution to seamlessly orchestrate their distributed applications across public and private clouds,” said Bill Fine, vice president, product, at Joyent. “We are working to integrate Docker Swarm with both the Joyent Public Cloud and our on premise, elastic container infrastructure solution, SmartDataCenter, because we believe Swarm will rapidly become the tool of choice for managing application portability.”
“Docker is becoming the foundation for how modern developers create and deploy applications,” said Florian Leibert, CEO of Mesosphere. “And when it comes to the operations side, enterprises want flexibility of choice in how they manage and scale containers in production. We applaud Docker's decision to provide an open back-end for Swarm, rather than prescribe a single approach. And we believe that Mesos and the Mesosphere Datacenter Operating System (DCOS) offer the most practical way for enterprises to operate containers at scale, so we are excited to integrate with Docker Swarm to support those Docker users.”
“Customers want container solutions that are open, portable and that don’t place restrictions on application architecture,” said John Gossman, architect for Microsoft Azure. “Working with Docker, we are delivering on that need, through offering extensions, templates and drivers that make it simple to deploy Docker’s orchestration technologies on Microsoft Azure. We believe this makes Azure a great place to run portable Docker applications while giving our customers the flexibility and freedom of choice they require.”
Docker Compose radically simplifies the developer experience in building and shipping distributed applications by allowing them to create multi-container implementations with a simple declarative YAML file. The YAML file defines which containers comprise the application and the links that they have to each other. In effect, Compose’s YAML creates and maintains a logical definition of a distributed application that can move from a developer’s laptop to a QA environment to staging, all the way into production. Compose-built multi-container applications run on the Docker Swarm beta. Distributed applications created with Compose will be dynamically updated to reflect, for example, a new release of an already dockerized service without having any impact on the other services that comprise that application.
Availability
These tools are available immediately for download.
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About Docker, Inc.
Docker, Inc. is the company behind the Docker open source platform, and is the chief sponsor of the Docker ecosystem. Docker is an open platform for developers and system administrators to build, ship, run and orchestrate distributed applications. With Docker, IT organizations shrink application delivery from months to minutes, frictionlessly move workloads between data centers and the cloud, and improve infrastructure efficiency by 50 percent or more. Inspired by an active community and by transparent, open source innovation, Docker has been downloaded 200+ million times and is used by thousands of the world’s most innovative organizations, including eBay, Baidu, Yelp, Spotify, Yandex, and Cambridge HealthCare. Docker’s rapid adoption has catalyzed an active ecosystem, resulting in more than 95,000 Dockerized applications and integration partnerships with AWS, Cloud Foundry, Google, IBM, Microsoft, OpenStack, Rackspace, Red Hat and VMware.
Docker, Inc. is venture backed by AME Cloud Ventures (Yahoo! Founder Jerry Yang), Benchmark (Peter Fenton), Greylock Partners (Jerry Chen), Insight Venture Partners (Jerry Murdock), Sequoia Capital (Bill Coughran), SV Angel (Ron Conway), Trinity Ventures (Dan Scholnick), Y Combinator.
