Last year at VMworld, container integration was a big topic of conversation. So what are the updates a year later? Patrick Chanezon, a member of the technical staff at Docker, Inc., discussed container integration with Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during VMworld 2015.

Integrated containers

Chanezon was able to unpack the organization of integrated containers. “The new hardware today is your Cloud provider — it’s Amazon, Microsoft, Google — and then the virtualization is with VMware.”

Next, Chanezon explained, there is the OS layer. All OS providers have started doing minimal releases that are going to run containers. On top of that, there’s the Docker engine running. “And on top of the Docker engine, you have orchestration platforms,” he said. “And these are the ones that are replacing PaaS, platform-as-a-service.”

VMs vs. container debate

Is the virtual machine vs. container debate relevant? Chanezon believes people are confused that one replaces the other. But, in fact, Docker is a technology that is used both by developers and ops.

“When Docker appeared, it was the right level of abstraction for DevOps to happen, the right packaging construct,” said Chanezon. “Developers can put their dependencies in a container, and then ops have all the right knobs to tweak for putting that into production. But it’s the same thing that you put in production that you have in the developer’s machine.”

Storage and networking for containers

Docker has just developed a plugin system — one for networking, and one for volumes. “One of the big issues for containers is that when you are deploying it in a multihost setup … before June, there was no way to move one full container with data to another machine with volume plugin,” said Chanezon. Now with these plugins, this can be done.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE