Supplementing our coverage of last week's Container World, here's our collection of news releases from the show.

What many of them have in common is an eye toward making containers — Docker containers, especially — more suitable for production environments. Containers have caught on with developers as a tool for test and development environments, but running them in production is a more complicated task.

Established companies including Docker Inc. itself are working on these problems, but it's also going to be a rich field for startups.

"How do you connect containers with a virtual networking system? How can large applications be managed and orchestrated? Are there specific security needs? These are the holes in the container ecosystem that are starting to be filled in with dozens of niche startups and more than $300 million in venture capital, according to Docker," writes SDxCentral analyst Scott Raynovich in the recent report, Inside the Linux Container Ecosystem.

Container World didn't magically spin answers to all those questions, but there were a few hints to be had.

... Avi Networks teamed up with Mesosphere to launch a container services fabric. It consists of containerized versions of Avi's virtual network functions, running inside Docker containers. The containers are scheduled and placed by Mesophere's Datacenter Operating System (DCOS).

... Red Hat expanded the capabilities of Ansible, which the company acquired late last year. Ansible's networking framework now supports:

  • Arista switches
  • Cisco (the IOS, IOS XR, and NX-IOS operating systems)
  • Cumulus Linux
  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s OpenSwitch
  • Juniper Networks’ Junos.

... Mesosphere launched Marathon, a production-ready version of its container orchestration.

... Separately (and technically outside of Container World), Mesosphere got some bragging rights, as its Datacenter Operating System (DCOS) is the engine behind Microsoft's Azure Container Service, which  launched to public preview this week.

... ContainerX announced VMware vSphere integration for its multi-tenant container management. This lets administrators use vCenter to create container pools.

... PLUMgrid demonstrated a plug-in for Docker's libnetwork, the networking framework developed by Socketplane, which Docker acquired a year ago. Other players with libnetwork plug-ins include Cisco, Metaswitch’s Project Calico, Microsoft, Midokura, Nuage Networks, VMware, and WeaveWorks, according to the report  Inside the Linux Container Ecosystem. WeaveWorks is also among the companies working on its own variety of container networking.

... Jisto gave the first public demonstrations of its Elastic Workload Manager. The technology sounds sort of like quality-of-service for containers; it increases the number of applications servers can run without taking resources from high-priority applications.