Joyent Unleashes Triton Cloud For Docker Containers

Now that Docker containers have emerged as a disruptive alternative to virtualization, the debate over where they should actually run is starting to get fierce.

As one of the earliest proponents of making use of containers in the cloud, Joyent has always made the case for running containers on physical servers; an argument it extended this week with the unfurling of a Triton Elastic Container Infrastructure cloud service for Docker containers that organizations can invoke as either a private or public cloud.

Joyent CTO Bryan Cantrill says the cloud service provider (CSP) is leveraging all the management infrastructure it originally created to manage containers in a production environment to now provide that same capability using Docker containers in a production environment in the cloud.

While Joyent may not be the only CSP moving to embrace Docker containers, Cantrill says it is one of the first to do so on physical servers. While it’s relatively simple to deploy Docker containers on a virtual machine, Cantrill notes that virtual machines introduce a lot of overhead that simply isn’t necessary. Not only can orders of magnitude more Docker containers run per physical server than virtual machines, supporting all the virtual networks those virtual machines create winds up adding latency to the cloud application environment, says Cantrill.

As for Docker itself, Cantrill says clearly more work needs to be done in terms of extending Docker application programming interfaces (API) across networks, but it is feasible to stand up a production environments using Docker containers on a Triton Elastic Container Infrastructure that now makes the entire data center appear to be a single Docker container host; thereby eliminating a lot of the hassle associated with trying to provision and manage virtual machines, says Cantrill.

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From a security perspective Cantrill adds that on the Joyent cloud each Docker container has its own hypervisor to isolate it from other containers and each container has its own set of IP addresses.

In general, Joyent is betting the customers will find that pricing per containers rather than virtual machine will not only prove to be more economical; it will enable Joyent to compete a lot more effectively against larger cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Given the momentum surrounding Docker containers it’s clear that there are a large number of applications currently being developed on top of Docker containers. Of course, how many of those applications will actually make it into production remains to be seen. But solution providers that clearly understand the unique attributes of Docker containers in the cloud are the one most likely to have the inside track when it comes to actually deploying them.