During Tuesday’s OpenStack Summit in Tokyo, Midokura launched the latest version of its Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM) and announced it's got a supporting role in the Kuryr project, which aims to bring containers to OpenStack Neutron.

The latest version of MEM supports OpenStack’s Liberty release, which was announced a few weeks ago, as well as previous versions Kilo and Juno. Midokura says MEM is one of the industry’s first Neutron plug-ins to work with Liberty. The updated MEM also supports containers, a cause Midokura will help to further advance in Kuryr.

“The objective of the Kuryr project is to provide the networking bridge between container uses cases — say, Docker — and Neutron APIs so that the operators can use something like OpenStack to manage the Docker container environment as well as the Neutron environment,” says Susan Wu, director of technical marketing at Midokura.

By bridging containers and virtual machines via an OpenStack cloud, Kuryr will enable the creation of one networking environment without implementing different networking processes, Wu says.

Kuryr, which is Czech for “courier,” is a Docker network plug-in that uses Neutron to provide networking services to Docker containers. It also provides containerized images for the common Neutron plug-ins, and Kuryr will help drive the changes necessary to fill in the missing pieces of Neutron.

In addition to Midokura, Huawei, and IBM also have engineers on the Kuryr core team, Wu says.

“We’re in the Neutron core team, and while we watch the open source and OpenStack community move up the stack, they started out as infrastructure as-a-service,” Wu says. “Now we’re seeing a lot more platform as-a-service and container paradigms moving into the community.”