Docker Adds Built-In Container Orchestration

One of the big stories to come out of DockerCon 16 was the announcement of Docker Engine 1.12. As efficient and effective as containers can be for developing and deploying applications, the sheer volume of containers can quickly grow to be overwhelming. Container orchestration has emerged as a necessity, and now Docker is incorporating container orchestration directly into the Docker engine.

At DockerCon 16 in Seattle last week, Docker rolled out the new Docker Engine 1.12, which includes native container orchestration built-in.

In a blog post, the Docker Core Engineering team discussed why container orchestration is now so important: “Container orchestration is what is needed to transition from deploying containers individually on a single host, to deploying complex multi-container apps on many machines. It requires a distributed platform, independent from infrastructure, that stays online through the entire lifetime of your application, surviving hardware failure and software updates.”

“While the cloud infrastructure wars garner the most attention, we forget that the battles on the application platform side are even more important for developers. This is evident today at DockerCon where Docker Engine 1.12 is being launched, joining the cloud orchestration wars,” noted Al Hilwa, program director for software development research for IDC. “This represents Docker’s (the company) focus on continuing to build on its hugely successful container technology and to grab the mind share back from other platforms like Kubernetes and Mesos, which have been generating a great deal of excitement in various parts of the ecosystem.”

According to Docker, orchestration today is at the same stage containerization was three years ago when the company entered the space. “There are two options: either you need an army of technology experts to cobble together a complex ad hoc system, or you have to rely on a company with a lot of experts to take care of everything for you as long as you buy all hardware, services, support, software from them. There is a word for that, it’s called lock-in,” said Docker in a blog post.

The goal of Docker Engine 1.12 is to provide the orchestration capabilities you need without the vendor or platform lock-in. By building orchestration natively into the engine, Docker wants to make it easier to implement, more portable, more secure and resilient, and faster than third-party orchestration options.

You can read the full post on ContainerJournal: Docker Raises  the Bar With Built-In Container Orchestration.