Docker Inc. today introduced new features for its enterprise products that aim to simplify the deployment and management of software containers at scale.

The startup is a major force within the container ecosystem, having played a key role not only in developing the technology but also popularizing it. Docker’s container platform leads the market to this day. Companies are adopting the technology en masse because it provides a portable and lightweight means of deploying software across many kinds of computer systems.

The biggest update that Docker announced today is for Docker Enterprise Edition, the commercial version of its container platform. The offering is receiving a set of federated management features geared toward large-scale deployments. They’re designed to ease operations for companies that run containers on multiple cloud platforms and on-premises environments.

“Most enterprise organizations have a hybrid or multicloud strategy and the rise of containers has helped to make applications more portable,” Docker group product manager Ryan Kennedy wrote in a blog post. “However, when organizations start to adopt containers as their default application format, they start to run into the challenges.”

One particular pain point is the challenge of consistently enforcing security policies across disjointed environments. According to Docker, the new federation features provide the ability to centrally set rules for all of a company’s container deployments.

Removing the need to configure each environment individually can potentially go a long way toward reducing errors. Plus, it frees up time for administrators. Docker said that the benefits of the federation features also extend beyond policy enforcement to tasks such as migrating containers between clouds.

Docker announced the new capabilities alongside two other updates. The first is the addition of Kubernetes support to the version of Docker Enterprise Edition that runs on Windows Server. Created by Alphabet Inc., Kubernetes is the leading open-source tool for orchestrating container environments.

The other update, in turn, focuses on the desktop version of Docker. The company previewed an upcoming release of the software that sports a new graphical interface and a templating feature that will allow development teams to directly share project components.

“This is an area our current customers have told us is of particular interest, not just for sharing, but also for application architects and security teams to create preapproved templates and possibly to restrict which services can be used,” said Docker product manager Gareth Rushgrove.

Docker made the announcements at its DockerCon user conference in San Francisco, where SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE mobile studio is broadcasting from the show floor.

Image: Docker/Twitter