Joyent Inc. hopes to speed the adoption of containers with a new service that promises to remove the main barriers to mainstream acceptance in one fell swoop. The launch is the culmination of a several-year investment in the lightweight virtualization format that originally rose from internal operational needs.

The effort saw the San Fransisco-based provider develop a homegrown orchestration system that now powers its data centers and has recently been contributed to the open-source community along with a number of other internally-developed technologies. Triton draws on the lessons gleaned during the development of the platform to provide what is described as an enterprise-ready framework for running containers in production.

The arguably biggest selling point of the software is a virtualization capability based on one of the components that Joyent released in conjunction with its operating system last year. The feature offers a middle ground between the two extremes that organizations must currently choose from when deploying containers.

The first option is running instances directly on the server. That maximizes efficiently and allows for the most flexibility in implementation, but the lackluster security of containers creates risks that the average enterprise has neither the will nor resources to address. On the other side of the spectrum is the approach of running atop a hypervisor that VMware Inc. has been promoting, which is safer but negates the benefits of the technology.

Triton deploys containers under the native virtualization paradigm of Linux and thereby allows organizations to achieve a reasonable balance between security and performance without too much manual tinkering. Each instance is then wired up to a virtual network that provides an added layer of protection and controls for handling traffic.

That functionality is useful for implementing composite applications distributed across multiple containers, which are already the norm among the handful of web-companies using the technology to power their services. It also doubles to provide a common connectivity layer between on-premise implementations and Joyent’s public cloud, a benefit that can take much of the pain out shuffling workloads back and forth.

That puts the provider in a better position to target hybrid use cases combining on- and off-site infrastructure, which are becoming increasingly commonplace as corporate data continues to move outside the firewall. Few others in the container ecosystem cover both sides of the cloud equation, but it’s only a matter of time until Joyent receives competition considering the rate at which that the movement is attracting supporters.