Docker Acquires Provider of Continuous Integration Software

Network Visibility Can Help Avoid the IT Blame Game

With the rapid rise of containers as a lightweight alternative to virtual machines in the enterprise, finding a way to manage this new form of virtualization has become a priority in Linux environments.

With that issue in mind, Docker this week acquired Koality, a provider of continuous integration software that makes it simpler to manage the application development and upgrade processes in Docker container environments.

David Messina, vice president of enterprise marketing, says the Koality software will be integrated into Docker Hub Enterprise, the management framework that Docker has created to manage its containers. Aimed primarily at on-premise deployments of Docker, Messina says that over time Docker Hub Enterprise and Docker Hub, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application that Docker also makes available for managing containers, will together provide a federated framework for managing Docker containers wherever they happen to be running.

The acquisition of Koality is the second significant move that Docker has made to provide container management technology in the last few months after acquiring Orchard Laboratories last July. In addition, Google is leading the charge in terms of developing an open source orchestration framework for Docker containers.

All in all, the management tools that are available for Docker container environments are maturing fairly rapidly as a broad number initiatives start to coalesce into larger management frameworks that will be required to make Docker containers a core part of an enterprise IT environment.