Docker – an open platform for distributed applications for sysadmins and developers

How to define Docker?

Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run any application anywhere. It include a portable, lightweight runtime and packaging tool called Docker Engine and a cloud service for sharing applications and automating workflows called Docker Hub. 

Docker lets you to assemble quickly apps from components and eliminate the friction between development, QA, and production environments. 

What benefits do developers receive when using Docker?

Docker lets developers build any app in any language using any toolchain. The app is completely portable and can run anywhere. By starting with one of the 13,000+ apps available on Docker Hub, developers can get going quickly. Docker Hub also allows developers to automate their build pipeline and share artifacts with collaborators through public or private repositories.

With Docker, developers can build and ship higher-quality applications faster.

What benefits do sysadmins receive when using Docker?

With Docker, sysadmins can provide standardized environments for their development, QA, and production teams and eliminate differences in OS distributions and underlying infrastructure. Due to standardizing on the Docker Engine, sysadmins are given flexibility in where workloads run. Importantly, with Docker sysadmins can deploy and run any app on anywhere, reliably and quickly.

Source: docker

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General information about an open platform

Open Platform Overview

An open platform is an approach where a company lets other companies build applications or offer products or services that can be used on their existing platform. The sponsoring company creates a standardized interface and allows other companies to build products and services leveraging their assets rather than controlling the development pathway.

Open Platforms has become popular in the energy and technology sectors and successful in the internet world through the use of open APIs (Application Programming Interface). 

How an Open Platform Works

An Open Platform leverages standards to let the third parties add functionality mainly in the energy and technology sectors. However, now applications are expanding into other industries because digital technologies have increasingly penetrated into daily home and work life. 

Benefits when using an Open Platform

There are numerous benefits to the open platform owner when letting partners to build applications or offer products or services that can be used on their existing platform: 

• Offer features to customers while your organization is kept focused 
• Allow for deep customization without tying up your own resources 
• More closely integrate a customer to your system, making them less likely to leave 
• Save time and money spent on sub-scale business development 

Where Open Platforms work well

Open Platforms will work well if they are platforms to serve a wide range of customer needs/ segments and a modular architecture lets different companies work together to support specific customer needs. 

Here are some elements referring to potential for open platforms to be successful:

• Multiple capabilities required where one organization is unlikely to span everything 
• Multiple customer needs and segments where a large variety of supported products will expand the market for the platform and fend off competing platforms 
• Competition along the value chain making innovation in each module/ component a requirement to maintain the pace 
• Financial models supporting the ecosystem of players where monetization maps to investment required 
• Low frictional costs for stakeholders in the ecosystem to make the required connections to the platform, enter the market, sell their product (automated business development and digital data transfer is what makes this so compelling in internet-based models) 
• Mechanisms for updating the standards as needs evolve 

Source: innovationinthecrowd

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