DockerCon EU Reveals Docker's Upcoming Open Orchestration Features, Commercial Enterprise Repository

Docker, the container-tech company revolutionizing distributed application development, previewed on Thursday both open source and commercial features that telegraph the dual directions of a technology many industry experts are calling the most disruptive in recent memory.

At DockerCon EU, the Docker convention held in Amsterdam, Holland, Docker CTO and Founder Solomon Hykes described a suite of upcoming orchestration features: Docker Machine, Docker Compose and Docker Swarm. Docker invited feedback and collaboration from its burgeoning community of ecosystem partners on those open source services for accelerating the process of assembling applications from discrete containers.

Scott Johnston, senior vice president of product at Docker, also previewed Docker Hub Enterprise, a proprietary offering extending Docker Hub, the public repository developers use to collaborate on Dockerized applications to private business networks. Docker Hub Enterprise will be sold by the commercial entity behind the Docker project.

[Related: Docker Unveils Enterprise-Grade Container System]

As major cloud service providers race to embrace Docker -- with IBM the latest name-brand cloud to announce a partnership -- the container-tech project is working to keep up with the demands of spectacular growth in its ecosystem and customer base, and spectacular hype to boot.

David Messina, vice president of marketing, told CRN that as Docker gains prominence and market share, its focus remains on maintaining its vaunted portability, accelerating DevOps, and facilitating continuity across the application life cycle.

"With mainstream adoption that's occurring within the enterprise, and more next-gen applications being built in Docker, the focus now is on enabling users to build multicontainer, multihost applications within Docker that maintain portability," Messina told CRN.

The comprehensive set of orchestration capabilities will advance that goal, he said.

Docker Machine makes it easy for developers to immediately start building applications with the Docker engine by prepping any host machine, from bare metal to cloud-based VM, to run and manage distributed applications.

Docker Compose allows developers to define the application stack, assembling applications from discrete, interoperable Docker containers.

Finally, Docker Swarm enables clustering and scheduling of Dockerized applications across the life cycle of the application, from development to deployment to operations.

Those three orchestration capabilities will be inherent to the Docker platform, leveraging the Docker user interface and interfacing with APIs in the Docker ecosystem.

The second major product announcement coming out of Amsterdam takes a different tack.

NEXT: Engaging The Enterprise

Docker Hub Enterprise commercializes Docker's popular repository service, Docker Hub, creating a private repository for storing and managing Docker images that sits behind a company firewall and obeys workflows aligning with the company's security and governance requirements. The private repositories can access the public Docker Hub through push/pull functionality.

The product was the result of feedback from existing enterprise customers wanting to build strategic business applications using Linux containers, but needing clearer control of that process, Messina said.

Later versions of Docker Enterprise Hub will add various access control capabilities, Messina told CRN.

Docker is bringing the enterprise product to market through three heavyweight partners: IBM, Microsoft and AWS. It's a formidable triad comprised of the world's largest software services company, largest software vendor and largest cloud.

Docker just inked a deal with IBM, which will offer its business customers Docker Hub Enterprise as either an on-premise solution or cloud service. The product will also be available in the Microsoft Azure Gallery and as an AWS cloud-transformation template.

The orchestration services are being released concurrent with DockerCon EU in alpha mode to allow members of the Docker community to weigh in on the open design.

Docker plans general availability for the three features in the second quarter of 2015. The API for Docker Machine, the provisioning service, has already been released to the Docker community, with some partners demonstrating interoperable applications at the European conference.

Docker Hub Enterprise will be made available for early access in February.