At this week’s DockerCon in Austin, Texas, open-platform provider for application management Docker Inc. charted its desired territory, which straddles open-source and enterprise and reaches far in both directions. While the newly unveiled Moby Project feeds its experimental developer demographic, other announcements promise to bear Docker into large- and medium-sized businesses on the backs of legacy companies.

“The MTA [Modernize Traditional Application] announcement is just as critical as the Moby announcement and … EE [Docker Enterprise Edition] prior to the show,” said James Kobielus (@jameskobielus) (pictured, right), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio.

The MTA program offers to wrap legacy applications in containers and bring them into the Docker ecosystem, knocking down another barrier between Docker and enterprise customers. 

Proving that Docker is not straying too far from its roots, though, the company is keeping to the open-source essentials, said co-host Stu Miniman (@stu) (pictured, left). “Kubernetes is a big rising tide in the environment, and all they cared about is they’ve got the open-source pieces that they need to be able to do Kubernetes,” he said. Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications.

Then the pendulum swings again; Docker is collaborating with Microsoft for running containers on Windows and through LinuxKit. Microsoft’s longstanding relationships with enterprises and smaller businesses will expose Docker to more developers, said Kobielus. Also, the OpenAI consortium has based its internal test bed training network on Docker.

Life on planet container

The upshot of all of these containers covering the planet is that increasingly virtualized or serverless information technology is the future, and it can’t arrive fast enough for businesses and developers, according to Miniman.

“At the end of the day, it’s not that tool; it’s the wave of that modernization,” said Miniman.

As a final thought, Miniman asked, “Where’s the watermark below this where you are probably not going to do containers, because you’re going to go live on a platform that leverages containers?”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of DockerCon US 2017 Austin.

Photo: SiliconANGLE