Docker says it is purchasing Kitematic and its eponymous open-source tool that allows developers to deploy Docker containers on a computer running on Mac OS.
Docker did not disclose the financial terms of the agreement, but the San Francisco-based corporate sponsor of the open-source Docker platform says Kitematic's GUI-based technology allows developers to automatically install Docker on a Mac computer in less than five minutes, giving them the ability to use the Docker ecosystem to create, ship, and deploy applications in containers that can be used in different types of hardware.
"Setting up Docker requires a number of steps," Betty Junod, director of product marketing at Docker, says. "You have to set up a virtual machine, you have to download and provision the Docker Engine, and so forth. Kitematic literally turns it into a single click."
More specifically, Kitematic uses Docker Machine, which lets users deploy Docker Engines on a computer, the cloud, or on a data center, to configure a developer's computer as a "Docker host" before installing and running the Docker Engine. The developer is then presented with a catalog of curated content, including images for Nginx, Minecraft, and Redis, which they can then use to run as Docker containers.
Kitematic also allows users to search and pull public images in Docker Hub and use these images as containers. It also features simple, one-click commands such as creating, running, restarting, and accessing containers and gaining access to developer code to modify containers, as well as more advanced automation features such as mapping ports, mounting drive volumes, modifying environment variables, and getting log information.
"People want to simply their experience and that's what this does. It wraps the command-line interface and removes the complexity and allows you to accomplish something much quicker," says Docker director Justen Stepka. "Then as you begin to increase your sophistication, it gives you the ability to deep-dive in and it still has a one-to-one mapping with the command line."
Kitematic is a very popular tool with developers, especially for those starting out, says Docker. Over the first six months Kitematic was posted on GitHub, it received more than 2,600 stars by developers recommending the tool.
Although Kitematic is currently compatible only with Mac, Stepka says Docker will eventually develop a version that will be made for Windows that will have similar features available on Mac.
"For us the main thing is to make it so that you can pull private containers, so that you can do something a little more meaningful - not that public containers are not meaningful - but do something that is potentially commercial," Stepka says. "Then we also want to make it double, triple, or quadruple the market by bringing it to the Windows platform."
Docker's announcement comes several days after it said it is purchasing SocketPlane, a maker of software-defined networking solutions, earlier this month.
