The pressure on IT organizations to catch up with the cloud providers taking over more and more of the technology services that they used deliver is driving demand for a better way of virtualizing infrastructure than doesn’t necessitate setting up a mountain of scaffolding for every instance. Docker Inc. was first to address that requirement with its namesake container engine, but it’s no longer the only one.

Canonical Ltd. dropped a bombshell last week after revealing that its following fellow operating system vendors Red Hat Inc. and Microsoft Corp. into the virtualization market with a new hypervisor that promises to deliver the same experience as the competition faster and more efficiently. Dubbed LXD, the software relies on the same Linux containerization feature that provided the foundation for Docker to isolate instances from one another but adds integration with popular security utilities along with management and monitoring functionality.

A parallel battle for container dominance is raging up in the public cloud, with the top providers – the very same which contributed so much to the momentum behind the movement – are locked in a constant struggle to one-up each other on Docker support. Google Inc. threw the ball back into the competition’s court at its annual infrastructure-as-a-service conference with the launch of a new service built from the ground up to run Dockerized applications. It’s also notable for implementing Kubernetes, a slimmed-down version of the management software powering the search giant’s data centers that was released under an open-source license earlier this year.

Google Container Engine made its debut as part of an extensive upgrade to the firm’s cloud platform also introduced a new sandbox mode for developers and additional connectivity options for corporate customers. But while the enterprise was only a secondary theme at Google’s event, it catapulted to the top of the agenda at Dell World later in the week, where the hardware maker pulled the curtains back on a new self-service portal for consuming services from a selection of third party providers, among them the search giant.

The marketplace offers organizations to consolidate the dozens if not hundreds of separate cloud bills they normally have to handle individually into a single charge. Moreover, Dell is promising to help customers help migrate workloads among the different platforms in its catalog through a combination of professional services and third party solutions including, of course, Docker. Rounding out the bundle is a collection of homegrown services that address some of the other key priorities CIOs have tos address when consuming cloud services, namely management and security.

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