Joyent Set to Cash in on Containers

With a mass movement starting to emerge around containers as a lightweight alternative to virtual machines there is naturally going to be a lot of competition among cloud service providers to host those containers.

The concept of a Linux container (LXC) has been around for a long time. But with the emergence of Docker containers as a mechanism for creating a container that can run on any operating system, the concept in recent months has become something of an industry phenomenon. Not only do all the major distributions of Linux plan to support Docker containers, Microsoft has announced that it, too, will support Docker containers in a future release of Windows Server 2012.

As an early advocate for the usage of the containers in the cloud, Joyent is among the cloud service providers with the most amount of actual experience running containers in the cloud. Fresh off raising another $15 million in financing, Joyent CTO Brian Cantrill said that part of the company’s strategy from here will be to optimize the company’s cloud platform to run Docker containers.

With major vendors now embracing Docker containers, Cantrill said the cloud service provider’s early bet on containers is now being validated. The challenge, of course, will be building out a cloud platform that is optimized for Docker containers before other cloud service providers. Having already bet heavily on LXC, Joyent clearly has the inside track when it comes to managing containers in a production environment in the cloud, Cantrill said. The goal now for Joyent is to become among the first cloud service providers to make available an entire provisioning stack for Docker containers running in the cloud.

Containers are not the first disruptive technology on which Joyent has made a big bet. The cloud service provider is also wide credited with doing much of the work that led to the development of the Node.js framework that is also being widely adopted by developers to make it simpler to build and deploy JavaScript applications.

In both cases, developers have led the adoption of both technologies. But Cantrill said it’s only a matter of time before IT operations teams begin to appreciate how much simpler containers are to spin up and manage than virtual machines. As such, cloud computing environments that are based on implementations of virtual machines have for all intents and purposes reached their apex, said Cantrill. From here on out the number of containers that are deployed in the cloud soon will far exceed the number of virtual machines, which Cantrill contends will increasingly be confined to running legacy applications. Meanwhile, the cost of actually deploying application workloads in the cloud is about to drop substantially, said Cantrill.

It’s pretty clear at this point that Docker containers have reached a level of popularity that even VMware has been forced to acknowledge. The challenge facing solution providers in the channel will be figuring out how to best take advantage of that shift at a time when the amount of actual experience managing Docker container environments is, at least for the moment, highly constrained.