Linux Journal has published a couple extended articles about Docker and its container technology, which is fast revolutionizing virtualization and cloud-building. Docker already turned those industries on their head, and now, last week, it went out and bought Orchard Laboratories.

Orchard was an early Docker community member and creator of solutions on the Docker platform, including a hosted Docker service and Fig, an application composition and orchestration tool. With the Orchard team and technologies extending Docker’s capabilities for developers, this acquisition certainly appears to accelerate Docker’s mission of delivering an open platform to build, ship and run distributed applications...and ultimately take over the planet!

“Our goal is to provide the best tools and experiences for developers creating web-scale applications that move frictionlessly between bare metal, virtualized, and cloud environments,” said Ben Golub, CEO, Docker. “Orchard really stood out to us with their vision of what developers need and their delivery of well-designed services and products.”

Docker, Inc., is the commercial entity behind the open-source Docker project and the Docker ecosystem. Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship and run distributed applications. Benefits Docker tous include enabling IT organizations to shrink application delivery from months to minutes, to move workloads between data centers and the cloud frictionlessly, while at the same time slashing infrastructure costs by 50% or more.

Docker was inspired by an active community and by transparent, open-source innovation. It already has been downloaded 4+ million times and is used by thousands of organizations worldwide, including eBay, Baidu, Yelp, Spotify, Yandex and Cambridge HealthCare.