In little more than a year and with 10 employees, scrappy startup ContainerX not only built an enterprise container platform but has also brought it to general availability.

ContainerX is making that announcement today, in advance of next week's DockerCon in Seattle.

Credit ContainerX's employees for working hard, but the company's story is also a testament to the fast pace of the container world. Docker startups, open source projects, and new container environments have been sprouting like dandelions, the latest example being Habitat, an automation platform announced yesterday by Chef.

That doesn't mean the work is all easy. "Building an enterprise infrastructure product and going GA [general availability] in five quarters is no joke," says Kiran Kamity, ContainerX’s CEO.

He likens the company's software to VMware's vSphere, only for containers rather than servers. That is, it connects containers to pools of resources, such as storage, creating an infrastructure based on technology the company calls Elastic Container Clusters.

Docker Datacenter and Rancher Labs are pursuing the same goal of creating a production environment for containers, but both have focused only on Linux — specifically, on Docker environments. ContainerX expects to stand out by offering a multitenant environment and by offering support for Windows containers, because in order for enterprises to take notice, "Windows has got to be a first-class citizen," Kamity says.

ContainerX's beta run, launched in November, resulted in 25 enterprise installations and two "verbally committed beta customers," Kamity says. One customer the startup can name is Advantage24, a cloud provider offering bare-metal resources out of three data centers in Tokyo.

ContainerX is offering its software for free for up to 100 CPU cores. Gold and Platinum options are also available, with prices based on the number of logical CPU cores being used.

Photo: ContainerX CTO Pradeep Padala (left) and CEO Kiran Kamity, outside their Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters.