Docker Inc. said today that the new version of its flagship container application development platform is now generally available.

Docker Enterprise 3.0, which entered beta in April, is an enterprise-grade version of the company’s open-source tools, which enable developers to build container-based software applications.

Containerized apps are popular with developers because they can run on different types of infrastructure and because they can be updated more easily on a continuous basis. They’re also modular in nature, which means developers can package the main components of their software into separate containers, thereby making maintenance tasks easier.

Docker’s platform is one of the most widely used sets of tools for building containerized apps, so the release of version 3.0 is a significant milestone. With it, Docker has added some major new capabilities, including deeper support for Kubernetes, which is an open-source tool used to manage large clusters of containers.

The addition of Docker Kubernetes Service is meant to make it easier to configure Kubernetes.

“Much of Kubernetes’ perceived complexity stems from a lack of intuitive security and manageability configurations that most enterprises expect and require for production-grade software,” Docker’s senior product marketing manager David Hamdani wrote in a blog post announcing the release. “We’re addressing this challenge with Docker Kubernetes Service. It’s the only offering that integrates Kubernetes from the developer desktop to production servers, with ‘sensible secure defaults’ out-of-the-box.”

Docker Enterprise 3.0 also gets a new tool for developers that “decreases the time-to-Docker,” Hamdani said. Called Docker Desktop Enterprise, the tool is meant to accelerate developer onboarding and improve productivity. Essentially what it does is replicate the configuration settings of a company’s container environment on individual workstations, helping ensure that any code that runs well on a laptop will also do the same when it’s moved into production.

There’s also a new feature called Docker Applications that provides the ability to create preconfigured software templates that include multiple components. Developers can “bundle the many distributed resources that comprise a modern application into a single object that can be easily shared, installed and run anywhere,” Hamdani said.

Finally, Docker Enterprise gets new lifecycle automation tools for ongoing operations that should make it easier for developers to speed up the deployment of container-based apps on different kinds of infrastructure.

“Using a simple set of CLI commands, operations teams can easily deploy, scale, backup and restore and upgrade their Docker Enterprise clusters across hybrid and multicloud deployment on AWS, Azure or VMware,” Hamdani said.

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