Red Hat Deepens its Focus on Docker

Docker, the commercial entity behind the Docker.io project, an industry leading container solution, and Red Hat recently announced a deeper relationship that builds on existing technology collaboration between the companies. At the recent Red Hat Summit, Red Hat's Paul Cormier said that containers divide operating systems into two components. One level manages traditional OS functions such as memory handling, while another level serves up a portable set of run-time engines that manage application images.  As part of their expanded collaboration, Docker and Red Hat will work together on interoperability between Docker's hosted services and Red Hat certified container hosts and services.

Docker is a project that is on everyone's radar due to the importance of standardized, open source, container-based approaches to application creation, deployment, and management. Red Hat has worked with Linux container technologies for years, and began working closely with the Docker team in September 2013. 

Since then Red Hat has worked to extend Docker for inclusion in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with new production-grade file-system options, integrated systemd process management, and use of SELinux for security. Red Hat has also packaged Docker for Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and launched the Red Hat Container Certification program in March 2014. Red Hat will now bring Docker container technologies into the beta program for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, and to OpenShift, its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering.

"Red Hat has a long history of developing, investing in and fostering innovative technologies, including Linux Containers, an open source methodology that has seen numerous, fundamental contributions from Red Hat over the years," said Brian Stevens, executive vice president and CTO, Red Hat, in a statement. "The Docker technology, which helps eliminate the barriers facing enterprise adoption of containers — ease of use, application packaging and infrastructure integration — was very exciting to us. We believe that integrating Red Hat and Docker technologies offers both powerful developer capabilities and a lightweight application packaging approach for enterprise workloads across industries. By working together, we can bring an extended set of capabilities to not only Red Hat customers, but to the open source and Linux community at large."

Docker is also in the news this week, because the new version of Ubuntu bundles it. It's one of the hottest topics in the open source arena.