Today we are very glad to announce that Baidu, the leading Chinese search engine, is using Docker for Baidu App Engine (BAE), its PaaS offering. As they were looking for alternatives and improvements for their “sandbox” approach, the Baidu team met and discussed with Jérôme Petazzoni in China during the 5th China Cloud Computing Conference. They decided that Docker might fit their requirements, and after several weeks of tests and studies, they took the decision to use Docker for the new version of BAE. They quoted multiple reasons for this choice:

Docker (and containers in general) are a generic approach, making it much easier to support new programming languages, frameworks, and databases, compared to traditional sandboxes.

As a consequence, the cost of platform development and maintenance is significantly lower.

Containers are lightweight and don’t incur performance overheads, which means that platform operating costs are also under control.

The possibility to use regular frameworks, instead of custom platform-specific APIs, results in broader user adoption.

Last but not least, the Docker community is very active and is growing very fast.

Yifei Chen, tech leader of the BAE team at Baidu, and its team recently gave a talk at the Cloud Computing Architect Summit in China on why Baidu chose Docker. The presentation has been translated below (view original):

“We were drawn to Docker because it replaces sandboxing with containerization, enabling a multi-language, agile and cost-effective solution that provides our developers with the flexibility needed to support a growing number of frameworks and applications. Docker has a thriving ecosystem, and we are happy to officially join it.” Yifei Chen, tech leader of the BAE team at Baidu

Baidu further engaged with the Docker community by making contributions to the Docker repository.

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