| At the annual DockerCon conference, 5,000 participants from all over the world gathered together at the Austin Convention Center to witness the development of Docker and discuss the implementation of container technology. |
Solomon Hykes, founder and chief technology officer of Docker, believes that containers will become the mainstream this year, and will spread computing devices such as servers, data centers, clouds, desktops, IoT and mobile, or in finance, medical insurance, government, tourism and manufacturing. And traces of containers can be seen on different applications. The success of Docker is closely related to the development of the container ecosystem. When the entire ecosystem is successful, Docker will be successful.
"In order to take advantage of all the innovations that come together across our ecosystem, we need to start collaborating at the assembly level," Patrick Chanezon, IT lead at Docker, told The New Stack in an interview. These tools were demonstrated at the conference.
A project called Linux Kit is a set of toolkits for assembling an operating system for containers. The second project, Project Moby, lays the groundwork for collaboration on interchangeable components, allowing third parties to leverage component libraries and reference blueprints to build container-based systems.
LinuxKit is a tool suite that can be used to build a container-based Linux subsystem. All services in the system are composed of containers, whether they are system components or applications, so they are also easy to replace and remove. The goal is to make Linux container functionality compatible with all platforms, from Internet of Things devices (IoT) to hosts.
LinuxKit provides a container-based approach to building a custom, stripped-down Linux subsystem for each type of container, ideal for system builders who wish to assemble their choice of Linux features for specialized hardware or components Might be useful. Based on containerd, each LinuxKit subsystem will have its own Linux kernel, and each system daemon or system service will get its own container.
Justin Cormack, who is responsible for maintaining the Docker engine, pointed out that LinuxKit can create a portable operating system built with containers and designed for containers, which is both secure and streamlined. Container-based LinuxKit has a minimum size of only 35MB and a very short boot time.
The Moby project aims to normalize the increasingly unwieldy process of assembly-based systems, often involving multiple components from Docker and third-party providers.
Moby will provide container vendors and service providers with a framework, some common platform for collaboration, and a common set of tools and best practices for building and enhancing container-based systems, covering things like monitoring, orchestration, networking and so on.
So far, Docker has a huge library of more than 80 containerization components, including Swarm, containerd, Docker Build, and even LinuxKit. Many third-party components are now integrated into Linux distributions. Docker welcomes further contributions from community members.