On Monday, Docker announced a bevy of functionalities that augment the portability of distributed applications composed of multiple containers. Docker multi-host SDN renders containers portable across any infrastructure and enables distributed applications to communicate across IP networks. The multi-host SDN functionality allows developers to define the networking parameters of a distributed application and subsequently transport the application to another hosting environment without a fundamental transformation of the distributed application itself. In addition to multi-host SDN, the Docker platform now features a plugin architecture that facilitates enhanced plugin capabilities with technology vendors. Docker’s new plugin functionality allows for integrations with networking and storage technology from the likes of Cisco, Microsoft, Midokura, VMware, Weave for SDN and ClusterHQ.
Docker also revealed details of enhancements to its orchestration tools that enable a multi-container application to be “immediately networked across multiple hosts,” as noted in a press release. Docker’s expanded orchestration functionality also features integrations with Mesos as well as partnerships with the Amazon EC2 Container Service to optimize the scheduling of Docker-based applications for the Amazon Web Services EC2 platform. Taken together, Docker’s multi-host SDN functionality, plug-in architecture and orchestration capabilities continue to cement its emergence as the de facto infrastructure for the development of distributed applications in contrast to virtual machines. Docker’s multi-host SDN functionality, in particular, goes a long way toward rendering containers more portable across infrastructures while nevertheless allowing developers to tweak network topologies as needed to optimize the distributed application in relation to the specificities of the host environment in question.
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