DockerCon 2016: The Cloud News You Need to Know

Written by Christopher Tozzi
June 22, 2016

This week's DockerCon event was the scene of about two dozen major announcements from Docker and its ecosystem partners. Here's a recap of the ones that matter most for the cloud.

From data storage to networking to security and monitoring, this week’s DockerCon event was the scene of about two dozen major announcements from Docker and its ecosystem partners. Here’s a recap of the ones that matter most for the cloud.

Security and Monitoring

For starters, here are the major announcements from DockerCon related to security and monitoring:

Splunk announced support for monitoring Docker containers in public cloud environments. For now, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon’s AWS will be supported.
Netsil unveiled Netsil Lite, a free version of its monitoring and topology platform for cloud-based apps.
Datadog has added automated service discovery for containers to its cloud monitoring platform.
AppFormix announced the availability of ContainerFlow, a monitoring, scheduling and performance management tool for DevOps environments built in the cloud.

Networking

DockerCon saw a couple of significant announcements related to networking for cloud environments. They include:

Juniper Networks has updated its Contrail product line by adding new features for building software-defined networks for containerized cloud infrastructure.
Hedvig announced CloudScale Reference Architectures, a new Docker deployment tool that simplifies the deployment of containers for cloud environments, according to the company.

Storage

Persistent storage remains a challenge for containerized infrastructure, but companies are working to make it easier. Announcements in this area from DockerCon include:

Platform9, an OpenStack provider, announced a managed Kubernetes offering designed to simplify persistent storage for cloud environments that include containers.
Virtuozzo released Virtuozzo Storage for Docker, a container storage solution that can scale to include “up to hundreds of nodes with petabytes of storage capacity,” according to the vendor.
VMware announced Docker Volume Driver for vSphere, a plugin that integrates Docker Volumes with vSphere storage.

Microsoft Does Docker

Microsoft loves Linux, and it now loves Docker, too. The company announced that Docker Datacenter is now available on the Azure cloud marketplace.

Training

Last but not least is training. Since containers remain a relatively new technology for production environments, there has not yet been much in the way of training or certification related to Docker or other container platforms. But DockerCon saw one announcement in this area from Nebulaworks, which will offer a new course titled “Docker Containers: Cradle to Cloud.” The course will dive into how Docker containers work and explain how to migrate cloud-based virtual machines to containerized apps.