Some of the world’s biggest tech companies are lining up to help develop the open-source Kubernetes software container management system that search engine giant Google announced last month.

CoreOS, Docker, IBM, Microsoft, Mesosphere, Red Hat and SaltStack revealed on Thursday that they’re teaming up with the chaps at Mountainview to develop the open-source software that lets devs use containers instead of virtual machines.

The news will come as a big worry for VMware, because a world dominated by containerization is a world where VMware loses lots of money. Containerization allows apps to be packaged into individual secure sandboxes that are isolated from the rest – they run alongside each other on the same machine running on the same Linux kernel. They also share the same underlying operating system.

Virtualization is a different approach that involves emulating computer systems as virtual machines, where devs can put any OS and applications of theur choosing. Virtual machines are separate from others – including the OS they run on – which means that one VM could be run on Linux, anbother on Windows, for example.

One key advantage of containerization is this approach uses less computer resources, making it much more efficient at scale. The downsise to it is that it’s probably not as secure – if the underlying OS’ security gets compromised, every container running on that machine is exposed, whereas virtualization mitigates this problem as every app runs on a different OS.

Kubernetes was launched by Google at DockerCon last month, as a tool designed to ease management of Docker’s Linux containers in the cloud. It’s based on ideas from Borg and Omega to set up containers on Google Compute Engine, the infrastructure portion of the search engine giant’s public cloud.

The software is basically what Google thinks is the best way to manage software applications built around containers in the cloud, which means that, if it’s developed properly, it could well become stiff competition for rival cloud management systems like VMware’s vSphere.

That day could come soon now that the rest of the cloud giants are getting in on the action. CoreOS said its adding support for Kubernetes to its OS; IBM is to contribute code to both Kubernetes and Docker; Mesosphere will add the software to its Mesos open-source project; Microsoft will ensure Kubernetes works with containers in Azure; Red Hat will do the same for its own products; and SaltStack will work to make it run in other places.

Noticeably absent from all of this is Amazon, which likes to keep its internal infrastructure secret – it could be that the others are working together to try and build a powerful new technology that might finally allow them to unseat AWS as the cloudy king.

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