Benefits of choice

Docker Enterprise provides a wide range of infrastructure choices for running your EE platform. This means you can install Docker Enterprise in the cloud, on-premise, in a virtual machine, or on bare metal. You also have a wide variety of open and commercially supported Linux operating systems to run UCP and DTR. Worker nodes can be installed on Linux, Windows Server 2016, and even on OS 390. It is common to use mixed clusters with both Linux and Windows nodes to deliver a polyglot, distributed application stack of Linux and Windows containers.

This sort of choice is really important! It allows Docker customers to migrate an entire container platform from one infrastructure provider to another with relative ease. Therefore, if an infrastructure provider becomes too expensive, a Docker Enterprise customer can pick up their cluster and move it to a lower cost provider with relative ease.

In addition to infrastructure choices, Docker also provides a choice of orchestrators. Docker Enterprise includes both Swarm and Kubernetes out of the box. While some cloud-native pundits claim to not much for Swarm, it is where most enterprises, when given a real choice, like to start because of its security and simplicity. Later they can graduate to more sophisticated Kubernetes applications.