Docker Opens Platform With Open Source

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The DockerCon 17 conference sees the container platform open up with the announcement of a pair of open source projects-- the LinuxKit subsystem and the Moby Project workflow tool.

DockerCon 17On the other hand LinuxKit is a means for developers to build a Linx subsystem using only the services and features required for the application or service they support. It is portable and works on desktop, server, IoT, mainframe, Intel, ARM, bare metal and virtualised deployments, and is managed under the governance of the Linux Foundation.

"Instead of starting from a traditional Linux distribution and trying to shrink it down and make it optimized for containers, we've started [LinuxKit] from nothing and added the bare minimum kernel, the bare minimum system libraries and container runtime and that's it," Docker founder and CTO Solomon Hykes says in his DockerCon keynote. "Everything else is optional because everything else is a container."

On the other hand he Moby Project is described as a framework for the assembly of specialised container systems. It builds on LinuxKit, and offers a library of over 80 components (including all parts required for a container platform), and developers can add non-Docker components without need for "reinventing the wheel" during the building of specialised applications. As mentioned earlier it is open source, and run by the community.

"Openness is important because it's the only way things work for us," Hykes adds.

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