(cache) Announcing Docker 1.7: Multi-host networking, plugins and orchestration updates

We’re pleased to announce huge updates to Engine, Compose, Swarm and Machine, as well as an preview of new networking and plugin systems.

We’ve been working really hard with the community to improve the quality of our projects, and this release includes a bunch of things to help with that. As part of the new networking and plugins systems in Engine, the networking and volumes systems have been completely rewritten. Also, Swarm and Compose have taken some big strides towards stability and production readiness.

In this release of Engine, we’re also trying something new. The networking and plugin features are being released in a new experimental release of Docker, which allows you to try out features early and allows us to get feedback on them before we lock down the user interface and APIs. Check out this blog post to read more.

Networking

The experimental release includes a huge update to how networking is done. Containers can now communicate with each other across different hosts, and configuring networking has been made much more flexible with a new networks CLI. The stable release of Docker also includes a completely rewritten networking system. Take a read of this post to learn more and try it out.

Plugins

Alongside networking, we’ve got another big feature in the experimental release of Engine. We’re adding a plugin system for Engine, the first two available are for networking and volumes. This gives you the flexibility to back them with any third-party system.

For networks, this means you can seamlessly connect containers to networking systems such as Weave, Microsoft, VMware, Cisco, Nuage Networks, Midokura and Project Calico. For volumes, this means that volumes can be stored on networked storage systems such as Flocker.

This has been built in collaboration with Glider Labs, ClusterHQ and Weave. Read more on the plugins here, take a read of the blog post.

More Docker Engine Goodness

Networking and plugins are very exciting — but the stable release has also has had loads of updates.

The focus of this release is mainly on stability and quality, but there have also been a few new features. Here are some highlights:

• ZFS storage driver: You can now store images in ZFS.
• New networking internals: Although the stable release does not include the new UI, Engine’s networking internals have been completely rewritten and split out into a separate reusable library, libnetwork. This makes the networking internals much higher quality, and has also added an option to set a daemon-wide default gateway for containers.
• New volumes system: The volumes internals have also been completely rewritten to make them cleaner and higher quality.
• Internals refactor: Loads of other internals have been refactored to make them faster, more stable and easier to maintain.

For a full list of what has changed, check out the full release notes. If you want to try it out, head over to the installation instructions.

As always, we’d like to thank the community for all of their amazing help with this release. Things like the job system refactor couldn’t have happened without the help with the community. We’d also like to particularly like to thank @runcom, @hukeping and @dalanlan for their help on the issue #12151, @ibuildthecloud for help with the successive RC’s, @progrium for the work on plugins and @mic92 for ZFS.

Orchestration

Compose, Swarm and Machine, our trio of orchestration tools, have received some big updates, including a much smarter “up” command in Compose, Mesos integration in Swarm, and the ability to configure Engine and Swarm in Machine.

On top of all this, you can now use these tools together with the new networking in Engine to seamlessly deploy your Compose applications to a Swarm with all of the containers talking to each other.

Check out the full blog post to read more, or head straight over to the download pages for Compose, Swarm and Machine.

Learn More about the Docker News from DockerCon 2015

Join our next Docker online meetup recapping all of the news from DockerCon including demos of the latest features of Docker 1.7. The meetup is on Monday, June 29 at 10:00 PDT / 19:00 CEST – click here to register!