Docker, Inc., the commercial sponsor of the Docker open source project, has acquired Orchard Laboratories, a software developer offering an application composition and orchestration tool for application containers. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Orchard is an early Docker community member and creator of solutions on the Docker platform. Its Fig orchestration tool is noteworthy in the ease with which a developer can compose and manage a multi-container Docker application. After defining the application’s containers and their dependencies in a simple configuration file, the developer can – with a single command – automatically start all the components of the application, including containers, network connections, and storage dependencies.
Docker said the Orchard team and technologies accelerate its mission of delivering an open platform to build, ship, and run distributed applications.
“Our goal is to provide the best tools and experiences for developers creating web-scale applications that move frictionlessly between bare metal, virtualized, and cloud environments,” said Ben Golub, CEO, Docker. “Orchard really stood out to us with their vision of what developers need and their delivery of well-designed services and products.”
Docker is an open platform which can be used to build, ship, and run distributed applications on various clouds. The use of a container allows the same app to run unchanged on laptops, servers, data center VMs or the cloud — similar to the concept of shipping container for the transportation industry.
Kubernetes is a container cluster management tool developed by Google. It builds on top of Docker to construct a clustered container scheduling service.
In June 2014, Docker 1.0 was officially released, marking an important milestone for this open platform which can be used to build, ship, and run distributed applications on various clouds. Docker enables applications to be quickly assembled from components and eliminates the friction between environments. It consists of the Docker Engine, the de facto container standard, and Docker Hub, a new cloud-based service from Docker Inc., the start-up company behind the open source Docker project and chief sponsor of the Docker ecosystem.
