Red Hat and Docker.io today announced an expanded collaboration that will bring Docker’s container technologies to the Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux high-touch beta program and its OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service offering.

Docker‘s initial release was about a year ago, but in that short time, it has quickly become an extremely popular tool for developers who want to use software containers instead of more traditional virtualization technologies. Docker.io is the commercial entity that is shepherding the Docker project.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is currently in beta and uses Docker as its primary supported container format. Docker also announced a new JumpStart program for organizations to create pilot programs based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift. This program will offer training and installation support for Docker Registry, as well as Docker Commercial support.

“Red Hat has a long history of developing, investing in and fostering innovative technologies, including Linux Containers, an open source methodology that has seen numerous, fundamental contributions from Red Hat over the years,” said Brian Stevens, Red Hat’s executive vice president and CTO in a statement today. “The Docker technology, which helps eliminate the barriers facing enterprise adoption of containers – ease of use, application packaging and infrastructure integration – was very exciting to us.”

This isn’t the first time Red Hat and Docker have collaborated. As the two organizations announced last year, they are also collaborating on packaging Docker for Red Hat’s open source Fedora Project Linux distribution, as well as on filesystem dependencies and container provisioning. Last month, Red Hat also announced an extension to its application certification program to include containerized applications. This, the company said at the time, ensures that containerized applications built using Red Hat Enterprise Linux will work across certified container hosts.