Software Firms Scramble to Jump Into Containers

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Software Firms Scramble to Jump Into Containers


Docker, a Leader in Container Technology, Is Hot Among Programmers

By Shira Ovide
Nov. 4, 2014 8:08 p.m. ET

A tiny company with little revenue to speak of has pushed the mighty Microsoft Corp. to up its game in computer operating software.

The maker of Windows, the software that undergirds most personal computers as well as corporate data centers, announced a partnership last month with a relatively unknown venture called Docker. The San Francisco company is a leader in container technology, which is suddenly all the rage among programmers. Containers run on the Linux operating system, and Microsoft has had to add them to its corporate-focused Windows Server product or risk irrelevance.

Mike Schutz, a general manager working on Microsoft’s cloud-software services, said the company has worked with container technologies for years and moved to incorporate the technology into Windows computer servers recently in response to interest from customers and software developers. “For us, it’s all about the customers,” Mr. Schutz said.

The fear also extends beyond Redmond: Containers challenge everyone, from upstarts like VMware Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. to incumbents including Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co.

What makes containers so compelling? The technology encloses a program (or a piece of one) in a layer of software that connects seamlessly to the operating system and other computing resources it depends on to run. Putting a program in a container has a number of benefits, but a crucial advantage is that it can be moved quickly and easily from one computer to another—say, from a programmer’s laptop to a test system to the cloud. Given the pace of Internet time, harried chief technology officers are desperate for anything that speeds up the process.

“Think about a cake,” said Scott Johnston, senior vice president of product at Docker, likening the cake part to a server and the icing to a program. “You want to be able to change frosting from chocolate to vanilla. If there’s paper between the two, you can lift up the frosting and replace it.”

Docker kicked off the container boom 18 months ago, when it released its technology (also called Docker) under a free-of-charge open-source license. The software sparked the kind of rapid uptake generally reserved for consumer gewgaws like FarmVille, clocking 43 million downloads as of early October. Users include Google Inc.,International Business Machines Corp. , Spotify, Yelp Inc. —and, yes, Microsoft—as well as nontech companies like the BBC and a handful of big banks, according to people familiar with the financial institutions’ operations.

“The interest level is off the charts,” says Dave Bartoletti, an analyst with technology research firm Forrester Research Inc.

Although containers are redefining the Internet’s state of the art, they’re not entirely new. The idea has been around since the early 2000s, and it has been part of the Linux operating system since 2007. Companies including Google and Oracle developed their own container systems, but they were difficult to use and failed to gain a wide following. The technology remained relatively obscure until Docker finally made using it easy. The company standardized the containers and organized a comprehensive set of software commands to manage them. Software developers, eager to take advantage of the power behind kingpins like Google, started adopting the technology in droves.

Beyond revving up the pace of online development, containers are an emerging alternative to the software construct known as a virtual machine, or VM, that is a foundation of today’s Internet. Containers aren’t only faster and easier to use than VMs; they also make far more efficient use of computing hardware. Engineers say they can run between two and six times as many containerized programs as VMs on the same hardware, dramatically reducing infrastructure costs.

The potential of container technology to unseat VMs threatens the market for software sold by Citrix Systems Inc. and VMware, as well as tech giants such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Microsoft. The market for virtualization software is estimated by the research firm IDC to be valued at $4 billion in 2013 and growing at a compound annual growth rate of 13%.

VMware has warned about container technology’s limits but also moved to embrace it as a complement to its software. The company announced in the summer that it is working with Docker and said the best way to use containers is with VMware’s virtualization software.

A spokeswoman for Citrix didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Google doesn’t use VMs at all internally, and Docker makes that approach attractive for less engineering-heavy companies. Pantheon, a Web host that is a heavy user of containers rather than VMs, employs two full-time employees to run more than 70,000 websites for organizations including the Boston Herald and AAA. Fifty technicians would be required to do the same work using VMs, according to Pantheon Chief Executive Zack Rosen.

“We would not be able to do what we do without containers,” Mr. Rosen said.

The shift toward containers also ratchets up competition between Amazon.com, which rents computing capacity through its Amazon Web Services division, and Google, whose Google Compute Engine offers similar services and has gone all in for containers. On Tuesday, the search giant announced a product that lets software developers run and manage Docker containers on Google’s servers. The aim is to make it easier for developers to deploy containerized applications on Google Compute Engine than on Amazon Web Services. Even if AWS customers run containers on Amazon’s servers, they’ll run more efficiently, reducing the amount of resources the users need to rent and thus curtailing Amazon’s revenue.

“AWS customers are increasingly taking advantage of the ease and simplicity of launching and managing Docker containers with Amazon,” a spokeswoman said.

Still, containers have a long way to go before they can be called mainstream. Many large companies are experimenting with them but not yet using them widely, according to executives at both corporations and tech companies. Some observers say the buzz surrounding containers outstrips their utility.

As for Docker itself, the company has positioned itself above the fray, guiding development of its free software for the common good. That means its business remains a work in progress. The company holds $55 million in funding from marquee investors including Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Trinity Ventures and Yahoo Inc. co-founder Jerry Yang .

Questions loom as to how it will generate revenue. One possibility is by offering a software development platform as a service, technical support, and eventually commercial versions of its software. As a technology, though, it’s already a Silicon Valley fixture and promises to drive the next generation of software-based businesses. “This is the first inning of a new wave of applications that will move from development to deployment in one fluid motion,” Docker’s Mr. Johnston says. “We’re humbled that the market has given us the opportunity.”