Red Hat and dotCloud collaborate on Docker

DUBAI, UAE: Red Hat Inc. and dotCloud, the company behind Docker, an open source project to pack, ship, and run any application as a lightweight container, have announced a technical collaboration based on next-generation Linux Containers technology to help drive the next evolution of OpenShift by Red Hat, Red Hat's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering.

The collaboration between the OpenShift, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Docker teams aims to combine the versatile capabilities of Docker with the security and stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Gears in OpenShift. OpenShift developers will benefit from a simpler, more secure, lightweight, and portable environment for applications.

The OpenShift platform is built on the solid foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and provides secure, scalable, Linux Container-based multi-tenancy via Red Hat Enterprise Linux Gears.

On this platform, OpenShift offers support for various programming languages, frameworks, Red Hat JBoss Middleware, databases, and other services, and also enables OpenShift customers, partners, and community members to integrate their own technology through OpenShift cartridges. These features combine to power the OpenShift Online public PaaS and bring OpenShift Enterprise private PaaS software to enterprise datacenters.

Docker is an open source engine that enables any application and its dependencies to be encapsulated as a lightweight container that will run in almost any Linux environment: bare metal, virtualized, public cloud, or private cloud. Docker's user space library and utilities tool chain takes advantage of both Linux Container enhancements found in the modern Linux kernel and innovations found in the operating system such as the file system and namespace layers.

Docker uses this foundation in the Linux kernel to provide lightweight runtime environments and offer a simple user experience, focused on getting the maximum benefit from the operating system in a highly portable manner.

Docker and OpenShift currently leverage the same building blocks to implement containers, such as Linux kernel namespaces and resource management with Control Groups (cGroups). Red Hat Enterprise Linux Gears in OpenShift use Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) access control policies to provide secure multi-tenancy and reduce the risk of malicious applications or kernel exploits.

Through the collaboration, Red Hat and dotCloud are working together on several joint community efforts, including:

Packaging Docker for the Fedora Project, a Red Hat sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration. Red Hat and dotCloud are collaborating with members of the Fedora Project community to package Docker for Fedora, making Docker available for all Fedora users with upcoming releases, and also providing the initial packaging work that will ultimately enable Docker to more easily build and deploy on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Collaboration on filesystem dependencies, specifically designed to remove Docker's dependency on AuFS (Advanced Multi Layered Unification Filesystem) to meet mission-critical requirements from enterprise customers. Together, Red Hat and dotCloud have developed a new approach to provisioning based on the device-mapper thin provisioning technology included in Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and other distributions. This approach provides the same elegant user experience in a way that is more compatible with upstream kernel versions.

 

Collaboration on container provisioning, resulting in Red Hat's work to enable libvirt, the open source virtualization API project, as an option for creating containers within Docker, bringing enterprise-grade networking capabilities along with it. This approach will enable users to take full advantage of the robust networking capabilities of libvirt while maintaining the user experience of Docker provisioning.

Collaboration on OpenShift to integrate Docker with OpenShift's cartridge model for application orchestration. This integration will combine the power of Docker containers with OpenShift's ability to describe and manage multi-container applications, enabling customers to build more sophisticated applications with enhanced portability.