Now that its application container platform is starting to draw significant interest from the traditional corporate crowd, Docker Inc. is moving to provide better support for enterprise environments.

The startup today launched a new version of its commercial offering that aims to make containerized workloads more portable across the different platforms powering an organization’s infrastructure. Containers are a relatively new method of running applications that bundles an application and all the software needed to run it into a single package that works on any operating system.

Docker Enterprise, as the new toolkit is called, thus aims to help companies avoid the need to re-architect a service if they wish to change the underlying infrastructure or roll it out to a new data center with a different setup. On launch, Docker’s offering is certified to run on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Corp.’s rivaling Azure platform and six different operating systems.

The lineup includes five of the most popular Linux distributions in the enterprise market plus Windows Server 2016, which packs its own custom implementation of the startup’s container technology. Docker Enterprise also provides access to a selection of pre-certified plugins that can help automate large-scale deployments.

One of the roughly two dozen extensions available on launch is an open-source tool called Contrix that was developed by Cisco Systems Inc. as part of a collaboration with Docker it revealed this morning. The software provides the ability to manage the network activity of containers, virtual machines and bare-metal infrastructure through a centralized interface. The goal is to spare administrators the hassle of using a separate tool for each part of their environments.

Docker Enterprise is available in three flavors. The Basic version includes the company’s core open-source container tools plus the newly introduced certifications, while the Standard edition adds various automation features and access controls for regulating how users interact with a deployment. Lastly, Docker is offering an Advanced tier that can automatically check for security vulnerabilities in a company’s container cluster.

Today’s product refresh should help the startup better address the different ways in which its technology is finding use. Companies that require automation tools to help them with managing containers now have more choice in what they buy, while firms capable of handling maintenance operations on their own can cut costs by opting for the Basic edition.

The introduction of Docker Enterprise comes a day after GitHub Inc. reorganized its own product lineup in a move likewise designed to give users more freedom of choice. As part of the update, the company added a managed version of its on-premises enterprise offering that lets companies host their code repositories on its infrastructure.

Image: Pixabay