Apparently not wanting to be left out of the latest craze in virtualization, Cisco Systems, Inc. is hinting at plans to incorporate Docker containers into its emerging cloud services.

The tidbit comes from this blog post, which offers a fairly standard primer on containers vs. virtual machines. But the real nugget comes at the end of the post, when Kenneth Owens, Chief Technical Officer for Cloud Infrastructure Services writes, “Cisco Cloud Services is creating an Intercloud of container and micro-services in a cloud native and hybrid CI/CD [continuous integration and delivery] model across Openstack, VMware, Cisco Powered, and Public clouds. Look for availability early next year.”

Cisco has not yet responded to a request for a clarification.

What’s clear is that Cisco is committed to the idea of containers in general. The company teamed up with Red Hat Inc. on this whitepaper about the shortcomings of containers and how the two companies plan to address them. In the document, Cisco talks about “application-optimized containers” to address the  fact that when a new application is placed into production, “a networking team needs to select the appropriate VLAN, open ports, configure load balancing, set up port security through access control lists (ACLs), and apply network policies such as QoS.”

The company says it’s partnering with Red Hat “to automate network configuration using software-defined networking (SDN) and an application-optimized infrastructure. When a new containerized application is placed in production, the network will recognize the application requirements and automatically apply them.”

Top of the company’s to-do list is the issue of container security, because “Currently, kernel exploits at the host operating-system level affect all containers on the host.” Coincidentally, security is also one of the aspects VMware Inc. is hoping to address with its approach to mixing containers with virtualization as a way of ensuring application integrity.

“By combining containers and virtual machines, customers can improve their ability to deliver applications without compromising their enterprise IT standards,” explained VMware CTO Kit Colbert.

Besides security, Cisco is hoping to develop improved management and orchestration tools, plus better ways to create, deploy and retire containers. It’s also said to be working on “inter-container communication”, because containers apparently don’t chat nicely.

“Standardizing on one or a few methods for naming, discovery, and connectivity will help accelerate adoption of Linux containers,” explains the whitepaper.

There’s no word of when – or even if – these innovations might see the light of day. Nevertheless the fact that Cisco is contemplating them so seriously is yet more evidence of the huge impact containers are set to have on enterprise computing.

photo credit: AstridWestvang via photopin cc