This week, Red Hat has been touting its new virtual container technology. Red Hat president of products and technologies Paul Cormier went so far as to call it “one of the things that is really going to drive the future” in a keynote address at the Red Hat Conference. To support further development of containers, Red Hat also launched Project Atomic, which creates a community dedicated to advancing container technology.
Virtual containers are roughly analogous to the shipping containers that transformed the transportation industry in the 1950s. They are an evolution of virtualization technology that makes it even easier to move applications from one server to another or from one cloud computing platform to another. Several companies have been working on containers, including Pantheon, Docker and Oracle, as well as Red Hat.