Docker Acquires SocketPlane To Help With Container Networking

News this morning that Docker, the home of the anonymously-named container infrastructure initiative, has acquired an early stage startup, SocketPlane. SocketPlane's small six-person tea will be joining Docker and this deal can be seen as a case of Docker further building itself a complete and defensible product and business - always a hard thing to do given that they are trying to both support an open source ecosystem and create commercial viability for their own business.

The aim of the acquisition is for the SocketPlane team to develop a networking API that will help it, and its third party partners, to combine many different containers - this is critical if Docker is going to see widespread enterprise adoption - single container applications simply won't cut it in a large, complex and distributed enterprise context.

According to Scott Johnston, Docker's SVP of product, the SocketPlane team will focus closely on stringing together containers that reside in different data centers - an absolute statement of enterprise intentions. This API will, of course, be an extension to Docker's already announced orchestration services which themselves must have caused some tensions in the ecosystem. That previously mentioned initiative helped orchestrate multiple containers but it only works well for a handful of hosts and containers.

SocketPlane, whose staff have previous experience form big networking vendors and distributed cloud operators Cisco, OpenStack and OpenDaylight, has the experience, believes Docker, to accelerate development of this much needed functionality. According to Johnston the goal is to create a networking API that will play nicely with enterprise level gear from VMware , Cisco and Juniper. In a continuation of its "batteries included but swappable" strategy, Docker suggests that users who prefer to use VMware's own networking API will be able to do so.

This deal looks beneficial for those building networking tools that hang off Docker. Said Alexis Richardson, CEO of Weaveworks:

Our customers, including those in production, ask for APIs to extend Docker and Weave. We have all been working to address this, starting with enabling networking extensions. Delivering a network API is now a resourced priority for Docker. Networking is just the beginning – Weaveworks looks forward to uniting with Docker and the ecosystem, to define, ship and support these APIs.