Pivotal , Rancher Labs , Red Hat and VMware . That is pretty much every organization that has a stake in the still evolving container ecosystem .
A group of container loyalists believe that Docker should not become the way that the industry defines containers . CoreOS has Rocket , a competing container runtime , as well as its own container format . In addition , Google , Red Hat and VMware have aligned with CoreOS .
While Docker and CoreOS looked like they were going to battle it out in the market , that has not happened . Both have decided to cooperate , at least for now , and both are stakeholders in the Linux Foundation ’ s Open Container Project ( OCP ).
The Docker format and runtime forms the foundation of the evolving OCP standard , and Docker , to its credit , will provide both the draft specifications and the code around its image format and runtime engine . This has jump-started the project . Now the container community is waiting to see what will come from it .
While Docker is giving up some of its technology to form the standard , it can ’ t give it all up and still have a viable technology business .
Discussions about these kinds of tradeoffs happen all of the time in technology companies , not just with Docker . The container community must consider the fact that , if standards are driven by companies , then those companies must be viable long term .
Container Standards : Going Beyond the Core
The core container format and runtime are of the most interest to IT practitioners looking for standards . But let ’ s move out from the core to the cluster managers that most containers will use . Here things are a bit more exclusive ( proprietary and less interoperable ) than the core containers . Right now , these seem to be managed together by CoreOS and Docker .
Google ’ s Kubernetes
Kubernetes ( commonly referred to as “ k8s ”) is an open source container cluster manager that can manage containers , including the way they can scale and become more resilient . It can schedule containers , allocate them , and manage disk space and storage .
Kubernetes pretty much set the standard for what a container cluster manager should be doing . As such , it has the largest market share , based on what we ’ re seeing out there . But some surveys show Docker leading in the enterprise . These sorts of contradicting data points make picking the standard-bearers even harder . Most companies are looking for levels of adoption , as well as the relevance of a given standard .
12 | THE DOPPLER | WINTER 2017