Using Docker in production just got a lot easier
Hot on the heels of Wikibon releasing its recommendations for CIOs to start factoring containers into their plans, Docker, Inc. has enhanced its hugely popular flavor of the emerging virtualization paradigm to take more of the hassle out of the implementation process. The update covers every part of the journey, beginning with the initial deployment phase.
The mechanism through which containers are provisioned in Docker Machine, one of the automation tools that the startup launched earlier this year, has been modified to significantly reduce the amount of effort required to work with environments not supported out of the box. That’s a major boon for organizations seeking to use the technology in order to squeeze out more value out of their legacy hardware or rely on managed hosting providers for off-premise components of their hybrid clouds.
The emphasis on supporting different kinds of infrastructure is a core pillar of the container movement that is also reflected in the changes made to Docker Compose, the startup’s orchestration tool, which now sports a new feature for configuring applications across different environments. That can go a long way toward simplifying migration for complicated composite applications combining multiple containers, and in particular the notoriously rocky transition from development to production.
The update makes it easier to manage Docker instances once they’ve been moved into a live environment, too, with new support for the creation of drives to automate the process of feeding logs into third-party automation software. External management tools can now also access optional metadata labels that developers may opt to attach to containers in order to communicate operational parameters such as the application to which a particular instance belongs.
Although implementing that functionality was possible before, it required a considerable amount of manual tinkering. With that in mind, the native Docker Swarm clustering option – the third and final in the startup’s toolkit – to handle instances has likewise been made more practical through the addition of an improved distribution engine that evenly spreads out containers across infrastructure.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
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