New Standardization Efforts Will Light Fire under Application Containers

Software developers have been really excited about application containers for a while, and they’re even more excited about the prospect of standardization, announced at DockerCon. But there’s good reason for data center managers and other IT staff to be psyched, too.

In a post on Data Center Knowledge, Yevgeniy Sverdlik discusses recent drivers for application container standardization and the ways in which it will benefit “data center managers and other IT staff that oversee the infrastructure where much of the code developers write will ultimately end up running.”

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,” notes the Wall St. Journal.

The provides a kind of portability that benefits not just the developers but IT pros in the data center.

What’s making containers even more compelling is the prospect of standardization. Sverdlik notes in his post that progress toward widespread use of containers was in danger of slowing down because of disputes over what makes a standard container a standard container.

Now, luckily for developers and businesses alike, the major players in the industry have joined in support of a vendor-neutral project to create a single container standard, the Open Container Project. The project will be overseen by the Linux Foundation, and vendors backing the project include Amazon, CoreOS, Docker, Google, Microsoft, HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat and VMware.

How big a deal are containers? Has a lack of standards kept your organization from embracing containers? What will you do moving forward? Please let us know in the comments section below.