Few enterprise software startups are growing as fast as Docker Inc., and probably none have managed to garner so much buzz in such a short time, certainly not anytime since the dot-com era. There’s a good reason for that, according to Docker CEO Ben Golub (right). Speaking on theCUBE at the recently concluded VMworld conference in San Francisco, the industry veteran said that containerization is attacking the single greatest challenge underlying the converging megatrends reshaping the application landscape today: complexity.

“It used to be that applications lived a long time, and they were monolithic and deployed on a single server,” said Golub, a serial entrepreneur with two prior startup exits under his belt. “All three of those things are now basically out of the window.”

Today, developers are taking highly iterative approaches to building applications involving frequent updates, reducing dependencies by leveraging loosely coupled architectures and designing software to scale across thousands of servers, Golub told SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier and Wikibon.org’s Dave Vellante. Coupled with the emergence of new platforms like mobile devices, this trend has added an unprecedented number of moving parts into the service delivery mix that simply can’t be supported by the old way of doing things.

History repeating itself

Golub drew an analogy to the shipping industry, which he said “used to be a matrix from hell where you had to worry about whether you were shipping [one customer’s] bananas next to somebody else’s anvils and things had to be unloaded and reloaded every time they went from a ship to a train and from a train to a truck.” The advent of standardized containers in the mid 1950s solved that issue, and Docker is banking on its technology to do the same for developers.

The company’s open-source platform packages apps into virtual containers that decouple their contents from the underlying hardware in a manner that’s similar to that of traditional hypervisors like VMware Inc.’s Vsphere but which use fewer system resources. Golub said that gives developers the freedom to push the envelope without imposing any additional complications upon their environments and reduces hardware requirements, which is a win-win scenario.

“The key is that everything behaves consistently and that your unit of measurement is something that’s really lightweight as opposed to an application measured in megabytes with a guest operating system measured in gigabytes and somehow lugging that heavy thing around,” he said. Instead of including an OS image in every container as is done with regular virtual machines, Docker runs multiple applications on top of a single Linux kernel, which can save a lot of resources in large-scale environments with hundreds or thousands of instances.

A winning combination

Docker’s performance edge over full-blown hypervisors is a key differentiator for many use cases, but it’s only one part of the value proposition, the Docker CEO said. The more important advantage is that standardized containers are interoperable across different types of infrastructure, which gives users the freedom to move workloads to the most appropriate location as needed. That may be anything from a plain bare-metal server to a public cloud.

And as of last week, Docker applications may also be deployed in everyday enterprise environments running on VMware’s flagship vSphere virtualization platform, which has been seen as Docker’s biggest competitor. While integrating with a rivali solution may seem counter-intuitive, it’s necessary for an open-source startup touting interoperability as one of its main selling points, Golub said.

“Our partnership strategy starts with our user strategy, and our user strategy says that users should be able to build, manage and ship their applications of choice without us telling them what the right infrastructure is,” he remarked.

But there’s more to the alliance VMware than just providing customers with freedom of choice, he admitted. VMware includes advanced capabilities that Docker currently lacks, most notably in the areas of management and security. Golub explained that marrying Docker  with vSphere will enable his startup to push into the enterprise unhampered while it’s still working to add functionality.

Topping Docker’s plans are live migration, orchestration and monitoring features as well as a high-availability option, according to Golub. The CEO also confirmed that the startup plans on eventually extending operating system support beyond Linux, although  users of other platforms have a long wait ahead of them before they can start deploying containers.

“Next would be UNIX, just because there is some primitives that are really easy for us to use,” he said. Windows “is definitely on the horizon…but not this year.”

Watch the full interview below (18:45).