John Willis, a technical evangelist at Docker, met with theCUBE at DockerCon 2015 to talk about the contribution of his team to the larger vision of Docker. As one of the founders of SocketPlane, Inc., Willis has an eye for networking and how to improve container technology in that sphere. Once his team was acquired by Docker, they were able to integrate their work into the larger whole.

“As anybody could see, containers are great, and our basic network structure works, but if you saw the future of where this is going, the density of compute on a host … tt wasn’t going to work, and we saw that very clearly,” Willis said. So his team has spent the last three months building “a general-purpose architecture for the future of networking with Docker.”

What does it look like?

“We have this plugin architecture, and that was a core concept … we built an abstraction layer, and this primary abstraction layer is a new project on GitHub called libnetwork,” he said.

Originally, he said, “Docker was very tied to network components … it was very tightly coupled, and there [were] things about that that involved the application developer in a world they never should have been involved [in].” To minimize this, his team built an abstraction layer to sit between Docker and the driver layer. “Now what you have is, the server abstraction takes care of all the glue between anybody wanting a container,” Willis explained.

This has dovetailed well with Docker’s new plugin architecture. “The plugin architecture is something that Docker has been working very hard at for quite a while now,” he said. “It started with storage and then again when SocketPlane came in with a network story, it was, ‘OK, we need to use that similar architecture plugin for network.’”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of DockerCon.