New Open Source Contributions Might Just Save Docker

New Open Source Contributions Might Just Save Docker

Managing storage and networking in Docker containers can be a nightmare. New Kubernetes contributions may help.

As I’ve written before, Docker provides a better way to package and distribute software, which is one reason Docker adoption keeps booming, growing 5X in the last year. Awesome! But good luck getting those Docker containers into production. Not so awesome.

Enter Google. Google (now Alphabet) helped us all by open sourcing and spinning off its container orchestration solution called Kubernetes. Kubernetes makes a big difference, yet simply orchestrating Docker with Kubernetes doesn’t necessarily make life easy for developers. There remains a yawning gap from test to production.

Why? Docker containers remain mired in the enormous complexity associated with managing the dependencies in the networking and storage layers. It’s a modern day variation of yesteryear’s DLL hell.

This gap represents a huge market opportunity for a team of former Cisco Unified Computing Systems (UCS) honchos who started a company called Datawise. While still in stealth, their team has quietly been working on critical new capabilities for Kubernetes that they donated to the popular open-source project. Internally dubbed “Project 6” by the company’s engineers, the contributed code makes it much easier to use Kubernetes to deploy containers in production.

I recently caught up with Mark Balch, vice president of Products at Datawise, to learn more about their Kubernetes contributions and how the new software helps organizations actually get Docker off developer notebooks and running real workloads on servers.

ReadWrite: Tell me about the Kubernetes contributions Datawise made? Is this yet another case of vanity contributions to an open-source project that help no one but the contributing vendor?

Mark Balch: Our Kubernetes contributions have been accepted into the main trunk for version 1.2. We provided a vendor-agnostic, standard platform for I/O resource scheduling in Kubernetes. Now developers can describe network and storage requirements when building an application by just using the familiar Kubernetes pod definition file. That frees developers to work with the network and storage providers that deliver the best capabilities to meet their cloud-native application needs.

Continue reading >>>