Docker Inc. is bringing the container phenomenon to China via a partnership with one of its biggest cloud computing providers, Alibaba Cloud.

Founded back in 2009, Alibaba Cloud is the cloud computing arm of well-known Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd., and claims to be China’s largest public cloud provider. It says it’s entering into a wide-ranging partnership with Docker that will advance the user experience for developers throughout China by providing a mirror of the Docker image store, and also distribution for the Docker Hub on its cloud platform.

The move is significant, because Docker Hub, a central public repository for Docker images, is thought to have played a crucial role in the expansion of Docker container applications. The main benefit of the Docker Hub is that it provides developers with access to thousands of freely available, open-source containerized applications. By teaming up with Alibaba, Docker is making those same apps available to Chinese developers too, thereby securing a potentially massive new audience for its technology.

“As enterprises in China and throughout the world begin to modernize their application environments, there has been an increasing demand for an easy solution to deploy Docker on Alibaba Cloud,” Sicheng Yu, Vice President of Alibaba Group and General Manager of Alibaba Cloud Global, said in a statement. “Our partnership with Docker will bring enterprises the full lifecycle management needed to scale existing implementations into production.”

Along with the Docker Hub on Alibaba’s cloud, Docker is also launching its commercially supported product, Docker Datacenter, in China. Docker Datacenter, which comprises the Universal Control Plane for management, the Docker Trusted Registry for application images and the Commercially Support Docker Engine, enables what Docker calls “containers-as-a-service,” with improved security, policy and controls to the application lifecycle, without sacrificing agility or application portability.

Nick Stinemates, vice president of business development and technical alliances at Docker, called the partnership “a critical step to enable our vision of ‘write-once, run-anywhere’ apps that can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud.” He said the partnership will allow organizations to containerize legacy applications and build new microservices using Docker and Alibaba Cloud.

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