Google Stands to Dockerize the Future of Cloud Computing

Back in 2012, Google Inc. hired Eric Brewer, a computer science professor from the University of California, Berkeley, to redesign a brand-new computing platform that could span dozens of data centers across the globe and can process billions of user requests within milliseconds. That man delivered a keynote speech at a conference in San Francisco, mentioning that Google will put its considerable weight behind a new cloud-computing platform, Docker.

“Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications. Consisting of Docker Engine, a portable, lightweight runtime and packaging tool, and Docker Hub, a cloud service for sharing applications and automating workflows,” says its website. Docker is the brainchild of Solomon Hykes, who dreams to wrap any software in Docker containers, or “Dockeriz” them as he prefers to call it, which will allow it to run on any data center regardless of the operating system besides hosting on a privately owned data center.

Docker is a dream come true for companies like Google that rely heavily on distributed computer networks to provide web services. When users search on Google’s website or open an email or Gmail, they are not simply fetching data from a single server. Google uses computing power from several server processors in order to balance the load on a single server. When you are serving billions of requests per millisecond using a dedicated server, even a warehouse full of servers are not enough. Docker will effectively “standardize” the operating system environment of any software, making it portable across platforms. It means Mac software can easily share resources from a Linux server. Not only will that it enables software developers to span their network across multiple server platforms. For example, a single piece of software can run in the cloud by sharing server resources from both Google’s cloud servers as well as Amazon’s web services virtual server at the same time.

Before Docker, companies had to build mammoth data centers to share computing power across servers, as each server had to adhere to the same standards. With Docker, any piece of software can leverage the scalability of multiple data centers to deliver seamless content across multiple operating system platforms.

Docker is a big deal, and Google knows it. A developer from eBay, Ted Dzuiba, told Wired that “ if you believe that what makes life easier for developers is where things are moving, then this containerization thing is where things are moving.”

Google usages enough electricity to power 200,000 homes in any given moment. Docker will not only help companies like Google to cut down their investments and carbon footprint, it has the potential to alter the face of the entire Internet infrastructure.