Docker Inc. is moving towards closing the functionality gap between containers and traditional virtualization software one strategic acquisition at the time. The latest addition to its arsenal is Conductant Inc., a low-key startup that was founded by a group of Google Inc. and Twitter Inc. veterans to help organizations automate the management of their large-scale applications.

Co-founder Bill Farner boasts the special distinction of having spearheaded the micro-blogging giant’s development of Aurora, a workload orchestration framework credited in large part for the discontinuation of the infamous “Fail Whale”. The software helped Twitter practically nullify the amount of downtime that its users have to endure experience by dramatically reducing the need for human intervention in the event of a hardware issue. When a server malfunctions, it’s able to instantly reverse the operation that caused the failure or, if the problem lies with the hardware itself, have another machine pick up the slack.

But what first caught the DevOps community’s attention when Twitter decided to open-source the code for Aurora last year is its resource allocation mechanism. The framework can set aside a certain portion of the infrastructure in a data center for an important application, which avoids the possibility of a lower-priority workload interfering with its operation. Docker believes that the functionality could go a long way towards easing the management of large container clusters.

Bill Farner and his colleagues from Conductant are joining the company to help put the pieces together. Docker co-founder Solomon Hykes said one course of action that his company is weighing is to integrate Aurora with Docker Swarm, the homegrown clustering tool it’s developed to automate container provisioning. However, given that the framework has to be deployed as a part of a larger automation system called Mesos in its current form, the company may instead decide to directly port its capabilities.

Docker might also end up doing both and first add support for Aurora before embarking on the more complicated task of replicating its automation features. The latter is a requirement if the firm wants the everyday enterprise to be able to take advantage of the functionality, since the complexity Mesos presently limits its appeal to only the most tech-savvy of organizations. But regardless of exactly how the Conductant acquisition turns out, the container ecosystem only stands to benefit. 

Photo via Huskyherz