Docker feels heat from competitors Joyent and Linux

Docker, the container based virtualisation technology, is feeling the heat from increased competition.

Following the sudden success of Docker, other competitors - platform services provider Joyent and Linux distributor Canonical - have open sourced their container technologies.

Docker provides open source container software, which is a lighter and faster alternative to full virtual machine hypervisors such as those offered by VMware, Citrix and Microsoft.

Launched in March 2013, the Docker engine has been downloaded 20 million times and more than 13,000 third party projects have been built on the software, Docker states.

It is increasingly the dominant container technology on the market. Just this week, Google announced it would be providing software to run Docker containers on its cloud services.

Joyent and Canonical have noted this success and have released alternatives to Docker.

Joyent already offers a variety of platform services, such as the hosted version of Node.js - the popular open source JavaScript server side engine.

Similar to Google, Joyent operates its services on a container infrastructure with technologies developed internally.

Joyent has made its container based system open source. This system has two components, the SmartData Center orchestration software and the Manta object storage software.

Furthermore, Linux distributor Canonical has launched Linux Container Daemon (LXD), the secure container based technology.

LXD has speed to match that of Docker and security that is similar to that of a fully isolated virtual machine. It uses third party Linux security mechanisms such as Secgroup and AppArmour, as well as a number of Linux security technologies such as kernel support for user name spaces and CGroups.

According to Canonical, LXD has the ability to migrate running containers between one node and another with no downtime.

Open-sourcing this technology could advance the adoption of container based architectures more broadly.