Docker Inc. hopes to bridge the gap between the developers and operations professionals using its namesake container engine with a new paid service that offers to centralize application management in a unified interface. It’s meant to fill a role analogous to VMware Inc.’s vSphere in traditional virtual infrastructure but bears a much closer resemblance to the commercial offering of a fellow DevOps startup called HashiCorp Inc. in design.

The Docker Universal Control Plane morphs each of the company’s existing open-source container orchestration tools into a tab on a graphical console that can be quickly accessed to perform various administrative operations. A user is thus able to make configuration changes to the infrastructure that supports their implementation and quickly switch over to the monitoring panel in order to see the impact of the update on the performance of the applications running on top. The extent of the modifications they are allowed to make is determined according to their role.

Active Directory integration enables organizations to grant an administrator access to the full functionality of the Universal Control Plane while limiting a developer to using only the set of features necessary for them to release new code. Rollouts can be carried out almost completely independently thanks to a mechanism that allows their peers on the other side of the operational divide to pre-determine where and how changes are implemented in order to avoid the delay of manual deployment.

Better yet, the Universal Control Plane makes it possible to set different update policies for each development team in an organization to ensure that they don’t modify something they’re not supposed to, a level of control that reduces the risk of both accidents and malicious activity. Docker sees the functionality coming particularly handy in production environments, which are more often than not deployed behind the firewall, a fact reflected by its business model.

The Universal Control Plane is offered as an on-premise solution, although the startup is promising that its management capabilities can work with a container regardless of where it’s deployed. Docker is consciously trying to accommodate the kind of tech-savvy enterprises with the technical know-how to implement its software on a large scale, which are increasingly relying on a combination of private and external infrastructure to power their applications. But their requirements are not likely to be fully addressed by the platform’s core feature set alone, a limitation offset by support for third party plugins.

Image via Docker