Docker, Red Hat and Google Deliver Container News
With the new year in full swing, Docker, Inc., the organization behind the container platform, announced that it has acquired Unikernel Systems, a UK-based company focused on unikernel development. Built by creators of the Xen Project, Unikernel has a strong pedigree.
"Unikernels are designed to eliminate complexity and reduce footprint by compiling source code into a custom operating system that includes only the functionality required by the application logic," reports Docker's announcement. Meanwhile, Red Hat and Google have their own container news.
Unikernel technology is in use within networking and storage solutions. Unikernel Systems has been working to make unikernels more broadly adaptable and the tooling around them more available to the entire systems makers community.
According to Solomon Hykes, founder and CTO of Docker: “Our shared vision to take transformative technology and make it accessible to a much wider audience has made the union a natural fit and it aligns with one of our core tenets to separate applications from infrastructure constraints. Through the Docker platform, unikernels will be on a ‘continuum’ with Linux and Windows containers, enabling users to create truly hybrid applications across all formats with a uniform workflow.”
Docker is known for its portability and with unikernel technology, it will seek to give organizations "a flexible platform to build, ship and run distributed applications without being restricted to a particular infrastructure."
“We are excited to be part of an organization and a community like Docker that will have such a positive impact on the work that our team and the broader unikernel community have accomplished thus far,” said Anil Madhavapeddy, co-founder and CTO of Unikernel Systems. “Similar to what Docker has done for Linux containers, by combining forces, we will be able to unlock the entire Docker ecosystem for use with unikernels, including orchestration and networking. The integration with Docker tooling will accelerate the progress of unikernels and enable users to choose how they ‘containerize’ and manage their application - from the data center to the cloud to the Internet of Things.”
Meanwhile, also on the container front, Red Hat and the folks behind Google's Cloud Platform have a new partnership that will call for Red Hat to integrate OpenShift Dedicated to users of the Google Cloud.
As Computer Business Review notes:
"OpenShift is Red Hat's managed container application platform and the collaboration between the two companies is designed to make it easier for customers to adopt containers....Red Hat can obviously benefit from Google's market reach that will be able to further spread the company's code, while Google gains greater access to the enterprise developer market."
Google has said that it will integrate its Google Cloud Platform services such as big data, analytics and storage services with OpenShift Dedicated.