Docker Makes Orchestration Tools Available

Top Trends Driving the Data Center in 2015

Docker addressed the need to orchestrate containers in enterprise IT organizations by making available three tools for download today.

Promised last year, Scott Johnston, senior vice president of product for Docker, says Machine Beta, Swarm Beta and Compose 1.1 make it easier to provision infrastructure, create clusters and combine multiple Docker containers within a distributed application.

In combination, Johnston says all three tools address the lifecycle of an application built on top of Docker containers, which can run on a native server, on top of a virtual machine, or in a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment.

As an alternative to traditional virtualization, the concept of containers has been around for a while. But with the rise of Docker containers, there now exists a way to deploy a common set of containers across multiple platforms running inside or out of the cloud. As such, interest in building applications on top of Docker containers that can more easily span a hybrid cloud computing environment is running high. In fact, Docker also announced today that 30 vendors are now participating in the extended Docker ecosystem.

Naturally, there’s also a lot of debate over how to best manage Docker containers. Docker, for example is building its own management framework. But vendors such as VMware contend that the same management framework that IT organizations already use to manage virtual machines can be extended to manage Docker containers.

While there are not many Docker containers running in production environments yet, usage of Docker containers within application development environments is skyrocketing. As such, it’s only a matter of time before Docker container sprawl becomes a significant enterprise IT management issue.