Docker Announces Orchestration for Multi-Container Distributed Apps

Docker, Inc., the company behind the Docker open source platform, has announced new, comprehensive platform services for orchestrating multi-container distributed applications. These new services would accelerate development-to-deployment of applications atop any infrastructure, from on-premise virtualized data centers to public clouds.

Docker’s orchestration capabilities are delivered through three new platform services that are designed to cover all aspects of the dynamic lifecycle of distributed applications, where new code or a new Dockerized service that changes application functionality can be put into production in minutes instead of months.

The three new Docker orchestration services are:

  • Docker Machine – This service further expands the portability capabilities of distributed applications by providing the user the flexibility to provision any host with the Docker Engine, whether a laptop, a data center VM, or a cloud node. This would save a developer a significant amount of time in manual setup and custom scripting, resulting in faster iterations and compressing the development-to-deployment cycle.
  • docker-applicationsDocker Swarm – Docker Swarm is a Docker-native clustering service that works with the Docker Engines, provisioned by the new Docker Machine service, and creates a resource pool of the hosts on which the distributed applications run. By automatically scheduling container workloads and allocating resources, Docker Swarm would provide users with high-performance and availability while eliminating inefficient and error-prone manual resource management. Docker Swarm is structured in a way that a developer can test his clustered application across a few on-premise machines, while an operations team can use the same tooling to scale that same application across hundreds of hosts across diverse infrastructure. The Docker Swarm API supports pluggable clustering implementations, giving customers the ability to choose highly-scalable solutions like Mesosphere to orchestrate containers across tens thousands of nodes.
  • Docker Compose – This service provides developers with the ability to assemble applications from discrete, interoperable Docker containers completely independent of any underlying infrastructure, enabling distributed application stacks to be deployed anywhere and moved at any time. Defining a distributed application stack and its dependencies through a simple YAML configuration file converts what was an incredibly complex process into a simple one that can be executed in just a few keystrokes. This capability means that new distributed applications can be spun up in minutes. 

The three Docker orchestration services are now available as Alpha releases. APIs are now available for Docker Machine with others being made available in 1H, 2015. These three orchestration services are targeted for general availability in Q2, 2015.

Docker has been downloaded 67+ 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 60,000 Dockerized applications and integration partnerships with AWS, Cloud Foundry, Google, IBM, Microsoft, OpenStack, Rackspace, Red Hat and VMware.