Citrix has put its application delivery controller (ADC) into Docker containers, calling the result NetScaler CPX.

It's the company's first formal foray into containers, and it was one of several announcements made today in Las Vegas during Citrix Synergy, the company's annual customer and partner conference.

The overall theme of the Synergy announcements was the migration of Citrix apps into on-demand forms residing in the cloud – an arrangement the company is calling workspace-as-a-service.

NetScaler CPX is part of that transition to a software-driven world. The idea, as Citrix officials explained during a Tech Field Day session earlier this year, is that CPX instances could be installed onto each Docker host, managing the flows between different applications.

That might sound like a lot of CPXs, but consider that in a container world, there's no way to simply put the CPXs next to "where the applications come from." Applications are meant to be sporadic, both in duration and location, and the communication between them – the east-west traffic, as it's called – is a weak spot for traditional security products.

Being Dockerized, Netscaler CPX can also reside on a developer's laptop. This puts load balancing capabilities directly into the developer's hands, something that hasn't happened before, Citrix officials say.

The CPXs listen to orchestrators such as Kubernetes, so that when applications get moved or removed, the CPX knows which traffic-flows to stop or start watching.