In case you haven’t yet heard about the new container technology everyone is talking about, here’s the 411 on the whole shebang.

Docker is a Linux base piece of software that allows you to get far more apps running on the same old servers, while it also makes it very easy to pack and ship programs. In layman’s terms, Docker can get more applications running on the same hardware than any other piece of technology available at the moment. The platform enables developers to create, ready-to-run “containered” apps more quickly and easily, but it also provides them with a rather user-friendly way of managing and deploying those applications.

This pretty much explains why Docker has been generating quite a buzz lately among the enterprises looking for useful and versatile new technologies that will help them do their business more easily. But, is everything just as awesome as the company claims, or are they making promises they can’t really keep?

Promises, promises?

Back in June at DockerCon SF, the company announced an on-premises solution for IT operations to have operational control without compromising developer agility and portability for applications running both in the cloud and on-premises. According to their blog post, the main goal of their latest software version was to “enable both developers and operations teams to develop, deploy, and manage “dockerized” applications in production”. This basically means this solution will allow their customers to build their own Containers as a Service platform so they can “deliver secure and manageable content on a programmable infrastructure to developers through a self-service experience.”

So, are all these promise just promises, or is this actually going to happen? It appears it is all true. According to their latest announcement of the public beta availability of Docker Universal Control Plane, the latest solution the company built is:

• Easy to use
• A product that satisfies the needs of both development and operations
• Enterprise-ready

How it’s Done

In order to accomplish the ease-of-use levels required, they integrated parts of the Docker project into Universal Control Plane. The idea was to start with Swarm as a basis for their clustering and orchestration (for proper scalability), while they also introduced Docker Engine, libnetwork, volume and network plugins, Trusted Registry, and Compose.

On the other hand, they needed to come up with a product that will satisfy “The DevOps”, which is why they needed to fully support the Docker API, which basically meant the “Universal Control Plane would not only support the entire Docker Toolbox but also the tools from the Docker ecosystem partners using the Docker API like monitoring partners, volume and network plugins and much more”. This isn’t always that easy to accomplish, which is exactly why they decided to take a developer-friendly interface and put it at the heart of a robust operations-focused, management platform.

And now for the enterprise-friendly part. Actually, we won’t be bothering you much with the technicalities as this is a team with many a decade of combined IT-developing experience. Since enterprise integrations were pretty much mandatory, here’s what they listed as solution inside the data center: “LDAP/Active Directory for authentication, API for monitoring streams, auditing and event logging, and role-based access control (RBAC).”

If your eyebrow is still up, here’s a chance to try out their beta version.