It’s apparently not just Silicon Valley investors who are excited about the fast-growing adoption of containers in the enterprise. China’s GRC SinoGreen was this morning named as the lead contributor to a $20 million funding round in Rancher Labs Inc., a startup that helps automate the management of large-scale Docker clusters.

Its namesake orchestration software is based on a homegrown Linux distribution called RancherOS that was specifically developed with containers in mind. The platform’s main selling point is that it includes only the bare minimum of functionality needed to support Docker, which reduces infrastructure requirements. Any additional system services that an organization needs can be deployed in a containerized form on top of the kernel and managed from the same place as the applications they support.

The arrangement minimizes the amount of redundant code in an environment, which leaves less attack surface for hackers to try and exploit. RancherOS also reduces the number of moving parts that a company has to deal with in the process and thus lets administrators spend their time more efficiently. The startup’s orchestration offering extends the capabilities of the operating system with controls for managing the other components of a Docker implementation, starting from the transport layer.

The platform lets users create a software-defined network to handle the traffic in their container clusters, provision persistent storage volumes for stateful workloads like databases and log activity using built-in auditing capabilities. Plus, Rancher makes it possible to integrate the service with a wide range of third party automation technologies in the event a company’s requirements aren’t fully met by the native feature set. The firm will use the new funding from today’s round to broaden its value proposition even further and step up marketing efforts in conjunction.

The push should help Rancher level the playing field against CoreOS Inc., a fellow venture-based startup that is also working to streamline container orchestration. Its automation framework is similarly built upon a bare-bones Linux distribution and provides many of the same capabilities as its rival, but places an increased emphasis on security.  As containerization continues to gain steam in the enterprise, the competition among the vendors seeking to monetize the trend is only set to increase.

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