In the software-defined era, the hardware abstraction layer doesn’t have to be a hypervisor. Sensing the winds of change, Red Hat is putting its weight behind an open-source Linux container engine called Docker.

Developed by dotCloud, Docker takes advantage of system-level functions to encapsulate any application and its dependencies as a lightweight container that can run on bare metal as seamlessly as it would in a virtualized, private cloud or public cloud environment. The main benefit of the technology is that it consumes considerably less resources than traditional virtualization frameworks such as VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer.

Red Hat announced this morning that has entered a strategic partnership with dotCloud to package Docker into its Linux lineup and make it more viable for mission-critical applications.

As part of the partnership, Docker will be made available for the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora OS and OpenShift, the company’s Enterprise Linux-based platform-as-a-service offering. Additionally, the tool will be integrated with the open libvirt API to deliver advanced networking capabilities and the option to create subcontainers.

Perhaps most notably, Red Hat and dotCloud plan to remove Docker’s dependency on UnionFS filesystems. The engine will instead utilize the device-mapper thin provisioning technology that ships with Red Hat’s Linux distributions.

“Developers want PaaS offerings that enable them to design and code applications without losing time on technology integration and how their application infrastructure is architected,” commented Ashesh Badani, the general manager of Red Hat’s cloud business. “They want applications that are truly portable and will run wherever they want. Through our collaboration with dotCloud, we’re bringing innovation from the community to our enterprise-class PaaS offerings to reinforce our goal of bringing operational efficiency and flexibility to developers.”

In August, Red Hat reiterated its commitment to the open source community with a new management platform that offers support for OpenStack.