BARCELONA, Spain - The open-source Docker container project provides tooling that enables application virtualization in a way that is more agile than other traditional approaches.

The agility of Docker containers is being used by developers in a number of unique and innovative ways to solve challenges big and small. At the Dockercon EU conference in Barcelona, Spain this week, the best and the brightest of those innovative Docker use-cases were on display.

Gaming giant Electronic Arts (EA) is among those that are now Docker users. More specifically, EA's Firemonkey studio is working with IBM to enable the Cloudcell mobile gaming technology to run inside of Docker containers.

Andrew Hately, CTO Cloud Architecture, IBM, said during a Dockercon EU session that EA Firemonkey is among the largest IBM Softlayer cloud customers, and by embracing Docker the idea is to improve density, resiliency and the availability of a number popular mobile gaming properties, including the latest Need for Speed release.

"Putting game logic inside a container makes absolute sense," Scott Porter, Senior Developer at Electronic Arts, said.

European Travel backend systems provider Amadeus has also embraced Docker containers for its applications. Udo Seidel, Evangelist and Chief Architect at Amadeus, focused his Dockercon EU talk on how he was able to use Docker in a PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliance driven environment. Seidel's basic premise was not to over complicate things and to leverage existing processes.

"Overall, Docker containerization has provided even better security due to separation of software and processes, " Seidel said.

Docker is also being used to help enable Bitcoin trading at Bity, which is an internet money gateway built by Swiss Bitcoin Exchange (SBEX).

Docker Helping to Unlock the Mysteries of the Universe?

Going a step even further, Marius Millea is now using Docker as part of the Cosmology at Home project to quite literally unlock the mysteries of the Universe, or as physics would have us believe, multiple Universes.

Millea explained that Cosmology at Home is now using data in a massively distributed effort to find the mass of a neutrino. It's a mass that in theory exists in multiple universes.

"In the past we would just create a virtual machine that works on all platforms, but every time you make a change, users had to download a full image, and that's difficult," Millea said.

With the Docker model, that's no longer the case, and Cosmology at Home is now more agile as a result.

The final keynote of the entire Dockercon EU showed another use case for Docker that is particularly creative and resourceful.

In this case, it's using Docker to run Minecraft that in turn is enabled with management features to manage a Docker cluster. In effect, making a game out of running Docker. The open-source project for managing Docker inside of Minecraft can be freely downloaded on GitHub.



Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at ServerWatch and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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