Barely a month after Docker Inc. CEO Ben Golub first revealed plans to introduce container management software in an exclusive interview with SiliconANGLE, the cloud’s hottest startup has delivered  with the release of no fewer than three new operations tools. The launch makes the new style of virtualization more practical at large scale.

The first addition is Docker Machine, a configuration automation utility that promises to significantly reduce the amount of hassle involved in laying down the scaffolding for containers. Maintained as an independent project, the technology enables developers to initialize hosts from the comfort of a command-line interface without having to log into each target server, navigate to the administrative console for that instance and manually input their instructions in the specific way appropriate to it.

That can add up to a lot of saved time across multiple machines, especially when several platforms with different interfaces are involved, a situation that is common in the hybrid cloud environments where Docker is designed to run. The tool also makes it possible for users to push a command to all of their hosts at once without having to repeat it for each.

For more advanced operational functionality, developers must turn to Docker Swarm, the second new solution that the company introduced at its annual Amsterdam event on Thursday. It’s a clustering engine that distributes containers across the available hosts for optimal utilization and reliability, automatically adjusting the placement of instances as the underlying infrastructure or application requirements change.

Two of Docker’s most important partners, Google and Amazon, have already adopted that functionality as part of their cloud-based container services. However, the intent is not so much to secure the startup more control over its ecosystem – although that’s undeniably a factor – but rather provide a unified management interface across different types of environments.

To that end, Docker Swarm relegates the core task of allocating resources for instances to a third party solution, with Apache Mesos set as the default on launch and more choices due to arrive in the first half of next year. That will allow developers to define management polices for multiple platforms – including Google’s and Amazon’s – instead of having to individually set and update operational parameters for each environment, which is not only time-consuming but also creates the risk of service level inconsistencies.

Rounding out the centralization is Docker Compose, which makes it possible to combine containers that have been deployed with Docker Machine and run under Docker Swarm into functioning applications. The tool, which is available as a standalone project just like its two siblings, works much like popular DevOps tools such as Chef and Puppet, allowing users to create a script that acts a single point of control for all the instances that make up a particular service.

Together, the three tools make Docker much more viable in large-scale deployments, which are rapidly growing in number as the container movement gains momentum. But orchestrating the components isn’t enough: such undertaking requires the developers doing the heavy lifting to work in sync, too, which is what the startup hopes to monetize with the fourth and final addition to its portfolio: an on-premise version of the workflow management service it introduced in June geared towards security-averse enterprises.