Microsoft, IBM, & Docker jump on Google’s Kubernetes project for managing app containers anywhere:

Now several companies that deal in managing infrastructure at scale have stepped up as contributors to the Kubernetes project, namely IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, Docker, CoreOS, Mesosphere, and SaltStack.

Take the development as more proof that technology can now span a very wide variety of computing environments. Docker and its container technology have grown popular based on the notion that containers could be the basic unit of computing, and Kubernetes could be the tool to orchestrate all containers at the same time.

The new backing of Kubernetes could also be a turn away from more segmented and often proprietary hypervisor technology that sits on top of server operating systems and creates many virtual slices for running applications within each physical server. As developers and companies begin to try it, companies that sell hypervisor software, including VMware, could start to wonder how they should participate in the containerization movement.

Mesosphere · Mesosphere to Bring Google’s Kubernetes to Mesos:

The big trend driving containerization is a fundamental shift in the way apps are built. Today’s apps need to ingest big data. They need to connect to millions of devices. They need to scale out, elastically, in real time to handle surges in usage. They need to be highly automated, with no human operators. And they need to be fault tolerant and self-healing, so that zero downtime is the new normal. In this world, the old way of doing things simply—building ever bigger monolithic apps that run on ever bigger machines—simply does not work.

Building apps today means building them like Google does—or like Twitter, Facebook, and Airbnb for that matter. As the early pioneers of the “always on, always connected” world, these companies had to invent new ways to build apps. An “app” at one of these companies is not a single “binary” running on a giant server; it’s comprised of dozens (or hundreds or even thousands) of composable services running on fleets of servers, distributed across entire datacenters and clouds.

Building an app out of many composable services, distributed across just as many machines in a cloud or datacenter—stitched together using technologies like Mesos—is how apps are being built today. If you are not yet building apps like this, you will be. This is the new way to build apps. This is the new way to deploy apps. And this is what is truly driving the container revolution.