What's the Intersection of Docker and OpenStack? [VIDEO]

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OpenStack and Docker are both open source technologies with a lot of excitement and momentum behind them. But where is the intersection between Docker and OpenStack? And why isn’t Docker Inc part of the OpenStack Foundation?

In a video interview, Ben Golub, CEO of Docker Inc. the lead commercial sponsor behind the open source Docker engine, explains where it all fits together.

At a high-level, OpenStack is a popular widely deployed Infrastructure-as-a-Service open source platform, while Docker provide an open-source container technology to build, deploy and manage containers. Golub noted that organizations are using Docker together with various flavors of OpenStack from different vendors including HP, Red Hat and Mirantis.

“OpenStack is a way to manage and deploy infrastructure flexibly and that’s an orthogonal issue to how you manage your applications, which is where Docker is really placing its efforts right now,” Golub said. “So people use Docker to manage the creation, deployment and building of containers without relying on any capabilities that are in a specific infrastructure.”

Docker is a topic that is often discussed at OpenStack events and there is even an OpenStack project, call Kolla, that enables the deployment of OpenStack as a set of containers. OpenStack’s Project Magnum is a another container effort, enabling container management in the cloud. Yet even though there is no shortage of Docker content in OpenStack, Docker Inc isn’t currently a member of the OpenStack Foundation.

“We certainly would be open to it,” Golub said about becoming a member of the OpenStack Foundation. “It’s just a matter of where we place our efforts and right now we are so busy with what we’re doing with Docker and the Open Container Initiative and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. We don’t want to be a member of an Foundation where we can’t be engaging in some kind of meaningful way.”

Watch the full video with Ben Golub below:

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist