Docker Opens Beta, Intros AWS, Azure Solutions

Container company Docker this week opened its beta for Docker for Mac and Windows. It also formally introduced Docker for AWS, and Docker for Azure. All this coincides with the DockerCon event, which is taking place this week in Seattle.

Solomon Hykes, Docker founder and CTO, said the company came out with a beta for Docker for Mac, and Docker for Windows, a few months ago. Today 70,000 people are testing that beta. Both solutions, he said, deliver the most seamless Docker experiences for developers who use Mac and Windows machines, adding that these solutions are an effort by Docker to remove friction from the developer cycle.

Making things easy is really hard, Hykes added, so Docker in late January announced the acquisition of Unikernel. As Mano Marks, director of developer relations at Docker, blogged in January: “Unikernels compile your source code into a custom operating system that includes only the functionality required by the application logic. That makes them small, fast, and improves efficiency. Unikernel Systems was formed last year to build tools that allow developers to take advantage of a growing number of unikernel projects.”

Docker also brought in designers from the mobile gaming arena, Hykes noted. He said the mobile gaming arena is five years ahead of the industry at large in terms of design.

As for the Amazon and Azure news, Hykes said that’s aimed at addressing the needs of ops teams at organizations using Docker. Ops using Amazon or Azure have these platforms all figured out, he said. They know what works and what doesn’t. That is their home.

The nicest way for an ops team to use Docker would be if Docker did the hard work of integrating Docker with AWS and Azure, he said, so that’s what Docker has done. As a result, if someone wants to deploy a new Swarm on AWS, for instance, there’s a cloud template, and the ops team member simple selects the desired number of nodes, clicks, and they are done.

These AWS and Azure solutions are currently in limited beta.