Docker’s meteoric rise on the strength of the continuous delivery movement’s thirst for containerization has been nothing short of remarkable. There’s perhaps no bigger sign of Docker’s uptake than in the build-up of its third-party ecosystem. The past year has seen partnerships galore from Docker and the biggest IT industry players, plus notable support of the Docker ecosystem amongst key service providers. Here’s our take on some of the cross-industry relationships that will make the Docker ecosystem stronger.

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1. Google

Google has had a big hand in helping to foster a collaborative Docker community, notably with the open source release of its Kubernetes container cluster manager. The project has gained tons of cross-industry support from IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat and more. Google is further strengthening its ties in collaboration with Mirantis Partners with the reveal last month that Goog would work on a project with the OpenStack firm to simplify the installation and management of Kubernetes applications on OpenStack.

2. VMware

Late last summer, VMware announced that it was working alongside Google, Pivotal and Docker to make it easier for enterprises to scale container-based applications on VMware infrastructure. As part of the deal, VMware agreed to collaborate on open source projects like libswarm, libcontainer and libchan, and to work with Docker to improve interoperability between Docker Hub, vCloud Air, vCenter Server and vCloud Automation Center.

3. RedHat

Just this month, Red Hat brought to fruition its plans to support Docker and other containerization technologies with the launch of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host operating system. Based on work done in the Project Atomic open source project, the OS is meant to offer a reliable platform for Docker, Kubernetes, Flannel and others for the enterprise market.

4. Amazon

For the past year Amazon has been bending over backwards to help customers more effectively leverage Docker on AWS infrastructure. Most notable was its big splash last November with the launch of its EC2 Container service (ECS), designed to simplify the management of Docker containers across a managed cluster of EC2 instances. It continues to add to that service—last month it provided updated enhancements to ECS that makes it able to use images stored in private docker repositories and to mount volumes in containers in ECS.

5. Rackspace

Rackspace’s long-running relationship with Docker starts first as a user, but extended notably beyond that in June last year when it was working to contribute to the Libswarm project and had created a backend plug-in for Libswarm that would enable its users to launch Rackspace Cloud Servers directly from the Docker CLI.

6. IBM

After a year full of big wins for the Docker ecosystem in 2014, it ended with a bang in November when IBM joined forces with the containerization upstart to integrate it into a range of applications for the enterprise market. As a part of the partnership, IBM launched IBM Containers, a Docker-based service delivered as a part of its Bluemix open cloud platform for application development.

7. Microsoft

Microsoft has been incrementally upping the ante with its Docker relationship, starting in June 2014 when it added support for Docker Microsoft added support for Docker in Microsoft Azure on Linux VMs. By October it had publicly committed to support Docker on future Windows Server releases, by adding resources to implement in-house tweaks to Windows Server and to support the open-source development of the Docker Engine for Windows Server. And in January Microsoft showed its commitment to the partnership with the release an Ubuntu image fully integrated with Docker and ready to deploy from the Microsoft Azure marketplace.

8. Puppet Labs

The most recent among Docker’s ecosystem wins, Puppet Labs this week pushed forward a new version of Puppet Enterprise that includes a special module specifically for managing the Docker Platform and launching containers in Puppet-managed infrastructure. The idea is to help users side-step configuration issues with the Docker daemon running containers.

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