Software container company Docker Inc. said today it has partnered with cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services Inc. to speed up application delivery.

In particular, the companies are creating a simplified workflow for developers that want to use Docker Compose to build applications that can run on the Amazon Elastic Container Service and Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate.

They announced at the AWS Cloud Containers Conference virtual event they have created a new workflow that takes care of deploying and managing containers on Amazon ECS, so developers have more time to focus on actually building their applications. Software containers are popular with developers as they’re used to host the components of modern apps that can run on any kind of computing infrastructure.

Docker Compose is a tool that enables developers to orchestrate multiple containers that work together, communicating with each other via web requests. It helps developers run those containers as a single service. The tool is popular with developers as it allows them to build more complex applications.

But up until now it has always been very tricky to migrate those apps and run them on Amazon ECS, which is a service that’s used to manage containers in the cloud without configuring an environment for the code to run in.

Justin Graham, Docker’s vice president of products, told SiliconANGLE in an interview that the problem is that Amazon ECS has some constructs that are necessary to run apps on Amazon’s cloud that were not part of the Docker Compose specification. “Some of those constructs could not be represented in Compose,” Graham said. “So developers had to go through some steps to make up for the fact that those constructs could not be represented.”

This lack of interoperability increased the time and effort it took to move workloads into the cloud. “Developers had to move into task definition, which is an extra step,” Graham said. “And it had to happen with every deployment.”

That’s why Docker and Amazon collaborated to fix the problem, building a simplified workflow that gives developers an easy way to switch from running containers in a local environment to Amazon ECS. Now developers have a much easier path to running their apps in production on Amazon’s cloud.

“The idea is to go from code to cloud on Amazon ECS using Docker Compose and Docker Desktop,” Graham said. The new workflow, he said, could result in days or weeks saved depending on the complexity of the application.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE it’s always good to see cloud vendors like Amazon work with its partners to make life easier for developers.

“Today Amazon and Docker are working together to provide a better developer experience, and that will ultimately result in higher developer velocity,” Mueller said. “This is a win for both companies, as well as enterprises that are always looking for ways to build their next-generation applications faster.”

With reporting by Robert Hof

Image: Docker