The answer to the fragmentation of the container ecosystem may have finally arrived from Rancher Labs Inc., which raised $10 million in funding this morning to combine operational features currently scattered among numerous different projects into a unified platform. At the center of its efforts is a homegrown Linux flavor orders of magnitude smaller than conventional alternatives.

The aptly-named RancherOS owes its small size to a lack of any functionality beyond the bare minimum needed to power up a server and deploy Docker Inc.’s dominant containerization engine. It’s the same approach taken by the other distributions that have emerged in recent quarters to help developers make the most out of the tool’s efficiency, most notably CoreOS.

The operating systems even handle management capabilities the same way, allowing developers to pick and choose which to use and deploying the code in containers like any other application. But whereas CoreOS leaves that task of providing that value-added functionality to the broader ecosystem, Rancher has taken the matter into its own hands with a complementary operational framework.

It distills the experience that co-founders Sheng Liang and Shannon Williams gained from building the Cloud.com infrastructure-as-a-service platform they sold to Citrix Systems Inc. four years ago into a pre-packaged bundle of managment services specifically geared towards containers. Included within are all the ingredients needed to set up a reliably-functioning cluster on RancherOS.

That provides an infinitely simpler alternative to cobbling everything together from the disparate projects in the Docker ecosystem, which can be unpractical due to the sheer mount of work required to assemble and then maintaining the combined whole as the individual components change with time. That makes Rancher the natural choice for organizations starting out with the technology, or at least so Liang and Williams hope.

Their optimism is shared by Mayfield Fund and Nexus Venture Partners, who led the $10 million round. The startup will spend the capital on hiring more developers to add more features to its platform, which currently can’t fully substitute competing point-solutions from the broader Docker ecosystem, not to mention the advanced management functionality available in conventional hypervisors. The narrower that gap grows, the faster adoption should increase, especially given that both components of its platform are available under an open-source license.