It was great to have Werner Vogels up on stage talking about “why developers love containers.” That was a wonderful lead in to my Docker presentation in front of the 13,500+ person audience at AWS re:Invent listening to Werner’s keynote. That kind of visibility is inspiring, but the thing I’m most excited about today is what great news there is for Docker and AWS customers with the launch of the Amazon EC2 Container Service.

This new product reflects AWS’ customer-driven approach to their cloud services and a recognition that their application developer community is clamoring for more Docker-based capabilities. One can understand why, after listening to fellow keynote presenter Pristine highlight their application that provides seamless, secure Google Glass communication powered by Docker and AWS. Pristine’s application is reshaping industries like healthcare where it can bring remote providers to the point of care in a new highly interactive fashion.

The initial focus of the Amazon EC2 Container Service is to address multi-container multi-host clustering, which aligns with customer requirements for high-performance and scale as they move their Dockerized distributed applications into production. We are thrilled that Amazon is pursuing a Docker-native approach to clustering.

The Amazon EC2 Container Service is a great follow-up to their announced support of Docker containers in Elastic Beanstalk in April of this year. Both are signs of AWS’ commitment to Docker containers. The launch of the Amazon EC2 Container Service comes with collaboration around Docker Hub our hosted registry service where Docker container-based applications are distributed, shared and collaborated on across the entire development community, or privately within an organization. Making Dockerized application “content” directly accessible to AWS customers means that customers have access to over 50,000 Dockerized components that reside in Docker Hub. These modular components allow an organization to leverage the best content from the community, while focusing its development efforts on a core set of differentiated services. AWS also contributes directly to the Docker Hub Official Repository program most recently contributing a Dockerized GlassFish application server.

In addition to collaborating on content, both AWS and Docker are focused on improving application portability. Dockerized applications are instantly portable to any infrastructure-–laptop, bare-metal server, VM or cloud. Docker has focused on enabling AWS developers directly from their laptops to natively build Dockerized distributed applications on a Docker engine on AWS. An early technical preview of Docker’s work in this area will be demonstrated today at AWS re:Invent in Session App303: “Lightning Fast Deploys with Docker and AWS.”

The power of our collaboration can be seen in the results of another joint customer, the Gilt Groupe. Gilt is the market leader in flash e-tail, and has rebuilt its site on a Docker, micro-services based architecture leveraging AWS. “Docker helps us keep services isolated and simplifies our continuous delivery pipeline that in turn encourages innovation and experimentation across all of our teams” said Michael Bryzek, Gilt Groupe, CTO and founder. Thanks to Docker and AWS, Gilt is able to make real-time changes to their service on average 100 times a day. The ability to innovate at that pace is where all organizations should want to be with their next generation of distributed applications.

Amazon and Docker have a longer-term plan to provide close integration between the Amazon EC2 Container Service and the growing ecosystem of Docker-based services. Both AWS and Docker, Inc are focused on enabling developers to quickly and easily take full advantage of container-based applications and deployment.

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