Docker Will Retrofit Old Enterprise AppsDocker Will Retrofit Old Enterprise Apps

AUSTIN, Texas -- DockerCon -- Docker is launching a service to help enterprises move old applications into container form in five days.

The resulting containers might be a rush job -- with additional work, they could probably be optimized and shrunk down -- but the point is to give an enterprise a taste of containerization. The service is meant to show that a quick turnaround is possible without having to change any source code.

"You just take the existing binaries, containerize them, and put them under existing management," says Scott Johnston, Docker's COO.

The new service was announced during the Wednesday keynote here, with Northern Trust giving a customer testimonial.

Figure 1: The view from DockerCon 2017 (Source: Enterprise Cloud News)

The service isn't necessarily geared at Fortune 500 types of enterprises. Many of them are already converts; Met Life and Visa are among the speakers discussing use cases at DockerCon. "This is no longer early adopter territory," Docker CEO Ben Golub said during a press luncheon here.

"For almost all of those, the path to getting to Docker adoption began with a small-scale project," Golub added. In those cases, the key is to show the enterprise that it can "get value out of Docker with a small team within a couple of weeks," Golub said.

That doesn't mean Docker has conquered the world. Some customers, such as small and midsized enterprises, might still consider Docker best suited for building new applications.

Docker, of course, doesn't want to be cornered in that niche. "There's a lot of money that can be made by breathing life into [legacy] applications," Johnston says.

Docker is working with partners to deliver the new service: Avanade, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Microsoft.

— Craig Matsumoto, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading