Docker, Inc., the commercial sponsor for the Docker open source project, just announced the acquisition of Orchard Laboratories, Ltd. For an undisclosed amount. Orchard has a long history with Docker as a creator of solutions for Docker that include a hosting service and Fig, an application composition and orchestration tool.

About the acquisition, Ben Golub, CEO, Docker said,  “Orchard really stood out to us with their vision of what developers need and their delivery of well-designed services and products.” He emphasized that Docker’s mission is to give developers the best tools to build, deploy, and frictionlessly move web-scale applications between bare metal, virtualized, and cloud environments.

Orchard’s orchestration tool, Fig, is particularly useful to developers because it allows easy composition and management of multi-container Docker applications. With a simple configuration file, a developer can define application dependencies, storage dependencies, application dependencies, and anything else needed to rapidly boot the application from cold start. The entire orchestration progress automatically starts all the components.

Ben Firshman, CEO and co-founder of Orchard, and co-founder Aanand Prasad will lead developer environment initiatives at Docker while continuing to maintain Fig.

DevOps and virtual containers

Linux virtual containers (LXC) have become somewhat vogue in the developer community for providing easily shippable applications for use in virtualized and cloud environments. As a result, tools that can easily move, deploy, configure, and monitor them will become part of the toolset every DevOps team needs.

Docker’s acquisition of Orchard will allow the open source project to include Fig and other tools with its deployment to allow out-of-the-box configuration and orchestration more easily.

When a virtual container is sealed, it may have all the configuration it needs to run itself, but it still knows nothing about where it’s going to deploy. A LXC management and orchestration tool is still needed to oversee the deployment environment and coordinate the different virtual containers when they are activated. Automating the process of checking dependencies, applying network connections, and other configuration means a faster cycle from development, testing, and deployment and easier maintenance.

This follows a trend of DevOps configuration and management tool vendors integrating with Docker. For example, recently Chef Software, Inc. announced a new version of Chef software designed for “web-scale IT”—which is a Gartner coined term for the use of cloud computing and virtualization at scale—that also includes strong Docker and virtual container integration.