IBM (News - Alert) announced recently that it had created enterprise class containers to facilitate application development in hybrid environments. The company’s efforts to push container technology are part of a larger movement that seems to be gaining popularity with many businesses.
The containers IBM created are based on the Docker platform and run in its Bluemix PaaS. According to its website, “Docker allows you to package an application with all of its dependencies into a standardized unit for software development.” System tools and libraries, source code, and runtime are all packaged together in one component so that the app runs the same way in any environment.
Although IBM has specifically created these containers with Bluemix in mind, it supports the Open Container Project (OCP (News - Alert)), a consortium of technology companies and organizations seeking to standardize software containers and ensure interoperability between them. Cisco, Microsoft, Google, AWS, and Fujitsu (News - Alert) are among the tech giants involved.
There is a growing interest in software containers and many feel it is superior from a technological standpoint to virtual machines (VM). According to ZDNet writer Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, containers share the OS kernel for other containers to use. Each VM uses its own kernel in isolation from the other VMs, resulting in repetitive instances of OS kernels and more resource consumption. Even one of the biggest VM vendors, VMWare has planned to use software containers as a complement to its VM solutions.
The technology is attracting investors too. Docker received a $95 million round of funding back in April, even though it’s not apparent how the company will make any money with an open source approach.
Scalability has always been one of the big selling points of cloud technology, and one of the technologies that made this possible is virtualization, but software containers appear to have exposed limitations in the structure of VMs. It could be argued however, that a software container is simply a more efficient VM. Whatever the case may be, the movement towards container technology is for real and without any improvements in hardware technology, it makes already powerful cloud technology even better.