Docker Inc. Deepens Ties to AWS Cloud Services
Docker Inc. and Amazon Web Services (AWS) today at the online AWS Cloud Containers Conference announced they are working together to better integrate Docker Compose, Docker Desktop and Docker Hub with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate cloud services.
Justin Graham, vice president of products for Docker Inc., says the biggest benefit of the collaboration with AWS is the ability to seamlessly integrate a local instance of a Docker Compose file with AWS container services.
Currently, a local Docker Compose file running on Amazon ECS has to be shifted manually because the constructs in Amazon ECS were not part of the Docker Compose specification. Under the collaboration, Docker Inc. and AWS are working to build a simplified workflow that allows developers to quickly and easily switch from running containers in a local Docker Desktop environment to Amazon ECS, says Graham.
Rather than having to create separate manifests, the same manifest can be used to locally employ Docker CLI and Docker Compose and then deploy multi-container apps via Docker Hub on to the Amazon ECS cloud. Those capabilities eliminate friction in the container application development process, which ultimately serves to advance DevOps, adds Graham.
Graham says deeper ties between the two companies follows a decision Docker Inc. made earlier this year to make the Docker Compose specification available as an open source project on GitHub. Docker Inc. at that time disclosed it was working with AWS, Microsoft and others to extend the Compose Specification to better support cloud-native platforms such as Kubernetes and Amazon ECS.
Docker Inc. in May announced tighter integration between Docker Desktop and Visual Studio (VS) Code developer tools from Microsoft and the container service Microsoft makes available on Azure. That integration is enabled in part by the Docker Compose specification.
Given the millions of developers who rely on development tools from Docker Inc. to build applications, it’s probable there will be similar levels of integration with other cloud service providers available soon. As those integrations become available, it will become easier for developers to truly invoke infrastructure as code, notes Graham.
Of course, there’s no shortage of tools available now for building containerized applications, ranging from the CLI that comes with Kubernetes to integrated development environments (IDEs) through which applications can be built and deployed on a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment. As the number of tools that can be employed to build containerized applications continues to expand, the number of developers capable of building these applications should expand into the tens of millions.
Most of the applications built by those developers will be based on microservices architecture through which organizations are employing containers to build and deploy software that is both more flexible and resilient. The challenge organizations will soon face, however, is finding a way to manage all those microservices across what is rapidly becoming a very extended enterprise.
