As virtualization becomes increasingly viable for common users and enterprises in a variety of common applications, many of those users are trying to determine whether containers or virtual machines are better for their purposes, while developers are pointing to a blend of both.

At the Virtualization Technology Users Group Winter Warmer 2017 in Foxborough, MA, Mike Coleman, technology evangelist at Docker Inc., sat down with Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, to talk about the mingling of containers and Virtual Machines, meeting the needs of users, and making the community open to engagement.

Common customers

In Coleman’s examination of the choices being presented to users, much of the focus was on VMware as a complement to Docker’s containers. In his estimation, as more and more Docker customers turn to virtualization, the beauty of Docker is the infrastructure that organizations run their application on is their choice.

“You may not have the quantity of workload it takes to natively drive the utilization you need to make your hardware affordable if you’re just running containers,” Coleman noted. “We’re in the early days, the early stages. Being able to put some containers next to some traditional VMs, to maximize resource capabilities, is a big use case. The other one is around some of the functionality in existing toolsets.”

And as the data and applications employed by these customers shift through various environments, the ease of managing those transitions becomes an important part of keeping the routine from becoming a cluttered, heavy workload. “Docker just makes it much simpler to pick and choose where it ends up,” Coleman stated.

Needs and answers

As Coleman explained, customers tend to begin implementing these solutions with the front-end applications before moving to the databases, because while there is “a common misconception that you can’t [use Docker with databases] … it requires a little bit more planning.”

And while that difficulty is there, Coleman feels that the results more than make up for it in the customers’ eyes. “The reality is, I don’t go to an event where people aren’t just effusive about Docker; they love Docker. And I love that. I remember getting that feeling at VMware too; people love VMware,” he noted.

At the same time, he does feel that the fringe sense of discontent with Docker utilities is being felt “more profoundly” by those who are deep into the ecosystem and that their work to improve orchestration is not yet complete.

“I think that the ecosystem is going to find the balance it needs over the next couple of years; I think that there’s plenty of space for everybody,” Coleman said. And, in closing, he advised developers to “chase the use case” instead of chasing the technology at large.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VTUG Winter Warmer 2017.

Photo by SiliconANGLE