It’s been yet another eventful week in the cloud, with Amazon adding support for the open source Docker Linux containerization engine to its Elastic Beanstalk service, which is used by application developers to automate certain administrative tasks such as capacity provisioning and load balancing.

Practically unknown just a year ago, Docker is gaining a tremendous amount of traction in the enterprise as a faster and more lightweight alternative to traditional hypervisors. Just as importantly, the technology makes it much simpler to move applications across environments – be they physical, virtual, private or public – by  eliminating the need to make any significant code modifications. That functionality makes it a perfect fit with AWS, which lacks interoperability with other environments and has been slowly losing ground to OpenStack as a result. And as SiliconANGLE’s Mike Wheatley observed, the integration also extends the online retail giant’s lead over competition: neither Google nor Microsoft, Amazon’s two biggest rivals in the cloud, offer any form of direct support for Docker. That will likely change in the future, but even a few months constitute a major head start in the cutthroat world of infrastructure-as-a-service.

Container technology is picking up a lot of steam, but traditional virtualization is continuing unhindered for the time being. Even as industry stalwarts IBM and Google failed to meet Wall Street’s expectations for the first quarter, VMware handily topped analyst estimates with a net profit of $561 million on sales of $1.368 billion, up 14 percent from the same period last year.

Cisco, meanwhile, has been busy bolstering its software-a-s-service portfolio as part of a billion-dollar-plus effort to build what it pegs as a global network of clouds. The vendor this week introduced a hybrid security analytics offering that consists of an on-premise appliance loaded with its AMP anti-malware software, the Sourcefire FirePOWER threat detection engine and a Hadoop 2.0 cluster for predicting traffic anomalies. It extends into the public cloud through interaction with Cisco Cloud Web Security, a hosted solution that provides protect against zero-day threats and a set of network monitoring capabilities.

photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photopin cc