Open APIs for Docker’s orchestration services expand collaboration opportunities for Docker’s vibrant ecosystem, which has grown into hundreds of partners over the 19 months of the open source project. Aspects of the orchestration APIs were previously made available to infrastructure partners to help showcase reference implementations as part of Docker’s open design process and are now being made available to the Docker partner ecosystem at DockerCon EU. This new set of APIs will also make it possible for standalone orchestration products to have their feature sets accessible through the Docker UI.
Docker’s open design process is reflected in the three orchestration services, which have been shaped by direct input from the community to cover all aspects of multi-container development to deployment in a continuous application lifecycle. Furthermore, the community involvement has structured these services to be modular, which provides users of Docker the flexibility to choose which service fits their application’s requirements with the ability to leverage other orchestration tooling from the Docker ecosystem.
“Batteries Included, but Removable.” All Orchestration Services are Optional.
Consistent with Docker’s layered, API-driven, open approach, users will have options when using each of these new orchestration services:
| a) | “Batteries included”: The user would run the default implementation of the service Docker includes in the release. | |
| b) | “Batteries removable”: Instead of running the default Docker implementation, some users may elect to use a third-party’s implementation of clustering, scheduling, or any other service written to the orchestration APIs. This will help preserve portability and interoperability, while providing users with the flexibility to choose ecosystem technologies that best suit a particular use case. | |
| c) |
“Single Container Only”: Even the use of multi-container orchestration APIs is optional. For organizations or vendors that only require a single Docker container approach, they can continue to use the Docker platform without changing the workflows they already have in place today. Even as the Docker project has expanded the set of capabilities around Docker, the community of developers working on single container functionality has tripled and the project will continue to invest resources on this use case. |
Availability
The three Docker orchestration services are now available as Alpha releases. These new capabilities are being demonstrated at DockerCon EU. APIs are now available for Docker Machine with others being made available in 1H, 2015. These three orchestration services are targeted for general availability in Q2, 2015.
Ecosystem Partner Quotes
Docker Machine
"Docker Machine allows us to deliver greater efficiency to our users who are leveraging Docker to build their distributed applications. By making the Docker Engine available natively in our cloud, we're making it even simpler for developers to deploy their distributed applications.” – Ben Uretsky, CEO, DigitalOcean
“We have strategically partnered with Docker because Microsoft is
investing in freedom of choice for developers. We believe that Docker’s
orchestration services APIs offer a flexible way to build, deploy and
manage highly available, distributed applications built for Linux
containers —and when available—Windows Server containers that are freely
portable between any host infrastructure. We are excited about the
Docker Machine Management API support for Azure as part of the Alpha
release.” – John Gossman, architect, Microsoft Azure
