Another week, another new startup jumping aboard the container ship. AppFormix Inc. is launching out of stealth this morning with a new solution that takes aim at one of the biggest obstacles standing the way of the lightweight virtualization format from achieving mainstream acceptance: orchestration.

Balancing the often overlapping operational requirements of different services is a challenge as old as virtualization itself, but the so-called noisy neighbor problem of one workload depriving another of resources moves to a whole different level when containers are involved. The blame lies with one of the main reasons organizations are adopting the technology in the first place.

The fact containers require a small fraction of the storage and memory used by the typical virtual machine makes it possible to deploy many more instances on any given machine, which can help improve utilization but makes managing everything that much more complicated. A production-scale environment can easily grow to tens or even hundreds of thousands of images.

That number goes up to billions at early web-scale adopters of the technology such as Google, which needless to say is no small feat to handle. In comes AppFormix, which promises to simplify that task with automation functionality that monitors the environment for noisy neighbors and provides an interface for administrators to define automated sharing policies to help resolve the situation.

That flexibility is essential in large clusters running mission-critical workloads alongside other processes where prioritization is key to avoiding interruptions. But the operational need may not necessarily end up translating into a proportionate business opportunity for AppFormix.

Such functionality is already available for Docker, the flag bearer of the container movement, from Amazon, which seals off a fairly big portion of the monetizable market given the dominance of its public cloud, where many if not most container clusters currently run. Then there’s the fact that Mesos, an emerging platform for powering Docker clusters and the second technology which AppFormix will support, also has native scheduling capabilities available in the form of the open-source Marathon framework.

That leaves a much smaller subset of environments with a gap for the startup to try and fill, especially considering that the companies already in production stages, including Google, have developed their own approaches to workload prioritization. But AppFormix hopes that the opportunity will grow once containers take off in the traditional enterprise, a belief shared with investor August Capital, which has put $7 million behind its cause on occasion of today’s launch.

Photo by Andi_Graf.