Well, that was fast. In May 2017, there were three major cloud container orchestration programs: Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and Mesosphere. Then, in early October, Mesosphere joined the Kubernetes bandwagon. Would Docker, the company which turned containers into IT’s hottest movement, continue the DevOps battle? Nope.

On October 17, Docker announced that it will integrate Kubernetes into the Docker platform. Users can chose to use Kubernetes and/or Docker Swarm for orchestration. Spoiler alert: Kubernetes is already the most popular cloud orchestration program by a wide margin. As Adrian Chifor, senior DevOps engineer at English background checking company Onfido, blogged earlier this year, “Kubernetes has the largest community and is the most popular by a big margin.”

This doesn’t surprise Docker. Solomon Hykes, Docker’s Founder and Chief Product Officer, explained at DockerCon EU in Copenhagen that the company added Kubernetes because “user feedback is our primary source of information to decide when to add new capabilities to the platform.”

The users spoke. Docker listened.

Hykes continued, “The addition of Kubernetes as an option alongside Swarm gives our users and customers the ability to make an orchestration choice with the added security, management and end-to-end Docker experience that they’ve come to expect from Docker since the very beginning.”

Docker newly minted CEO Steve Singh added, “What embracing Kubernetes does for us is it removes any potential confusion or any potential conflicts. We have customers that love Kubernetes; we have customers that love Swarm. My view is we shouldn’t force the customer to make a choice between one or the other—we should give them the choice to use whatever they want.”

Hykes said, “The Docker embrace of Kubernetes is the pure open-source distribution taken from the upstream project.” He also emphasized that Docker is not abandoning Swarm. “It’s not a fork, it’s not a wrapper—it’s real Kubernetes working next to real Swarm.”

Specifically, Docker claims it will simplify Kubernetes’s configuration and management by integrating all its components within Kubernetes Docker Enterprise Edition along with Swarm. You will be able to deploy Swarm and Kubernetes-based applications across a secure and automated software supply chain operating in hybrid cloud environments. You will also be able to use Kubernetes with Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows. This enables developers to build Swarm- or Kubernetes-based applications on a local machine using the same Docker enterprise tooling.

Kubernetes will be available across all of Docker’s certified infrastructure platforms. This includes multiple Linux distributions—SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Ubuntu, and Oracle Linux–and Windows. It will also be available on public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

You can sign up now to try the beta of Docker Enterprise Edition, Docker for Mac and Windows with built-in Kubernetes.

Docker’s embrace of Kubernetes leaves AWS with its EC2 Container Service (ECS) as the only major cloud or container vendor, that hasn’t natively integrated Kubernetes. That will change. AWS joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is Kubernetes’s parent organization, as a platinum member.

Besides, a recent survey found that 63 percent of AWS users were already hosting Kubernetes on Amazon EC2. Other companies, such as OpenStack cloud mainstay Mirantis, now supports Kubernetes on private OpenStack clouds, public AWS clouds, or both.

The only real question is not if AWS will also fully invest in Kubernetes now that Docker has taken the plunge but when. Will they announce full Kubernetes support at AWS:reInvent in late November?

The present and future of container management is Kubernetes.

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