Docker launches Universal Control Plane at enterprises

Runs anything on anything, apparently

Docker flew from the cloud into on-premise computing with the unwrapping of its Universal Control Plane 1.0, which it promised would allow real companies to deploy real containerized apps in real data centres.

The vendor said the product/service/whatever - debuted at the DockerCon EU event in Barcelona - would give IT ops folk the ability to “retain centralized control of infrastructure provisioning, user management and compliance” across public, private and hybrid clouds. Without compromising developers' prized agility.

The docs accompanying the release used the word “any” a lot. By infrastructure, it means compute, network and storage, as well as integration with security and monitoring.

It promises support for “any” application and “any programming language”, “any” platform as long as it is Windows, Linux or Solaris, and any instance, whether bare metal, VM or cloud. And, because we’re talking development here, you slot it into “any” stage of the development lifecycle from dev to test to QA to production.

Docker is describing the tech as “enterprise-grade management”, and says it will integrate seamlessly with directory services such as LDAP and Active Directory, to allow them to quickly expose relevant capabilities to developers.

You might expect such a virtual Swiss Army knife to cost. And maybe one day it will. For now, it is being offered as a public beta, registration here. However, given it is aimed at real companies with real containers in production, presumably it will fall under the “production” pricing tier for large scale deployments– ie, you have to request a quote that is going to be more than the $150 per month starter version of Docker.

[If you're a real company with real apps in prodution, we'd love to hear how you get on with UCP by the way.]

The UCP launch came a day after Docker burnished its security credentials, announcing hardware signing for container images – in conjunction with Yubico - content auditing and vulnerability auditing, via Docker Content Trust. ®