Joyent Inc., the container-native infrastructure company, today announced the ability to run container-native Linux images directly on bare metal with Joyent Triton Elastic Container Infrastructure, released into general availability earlier this week. Joyent also announced a partnership with Canonical to provide certified container-native Ubuntu images, optimized for Triton, to all Joyent customers.

"Triton is already the best place to run Docker containers, providing the ideal solution for microservices architectures and stateless processes," said Bill Fine, VP of Product at Joyent. "Now, leveraging container-native Linux on Triton, the benefits of containerization can easily be extended to legacy applications and stateful services, such as databases."

While Triton is compatible with all major Linux distributions, Joyent and Canonical engineers have collaborated to produce certified, container-native Ubuntu images optimized for Triton.

"We are very excited to have the best developer experience of Ubuntu, the number one cloud OS, running on the leading container platform in the business, Triton," said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu. "And, with Ubuntu Advantage Support, we are taking that experience to the next level."

Benefits of Bare Metal: Performance and Elasticity

Triton Infrastructure Containers deliver both bare metal performance and elasticity. By eliminating layers of virtualization and running containers directly on bare metal, applications enjoy the highest possible performance. Hardware virtual machines can't match the filesystem and network I/O performance or workload density offered by Triton.

"With financial transactions, security, performance and speed are everything. At Lucera, high performance containers such as Triton have allowed us to unlock the true benefits of containerization by eliminating the hardware hypervisor layer, allowing us to better utilize our infrastructure," said Jacob Loveless, CEO, Lucera. "Instead of wrapping containers in layers of guest operating systems and virtual machines, we are able to deploy containers in production securely, delivering bare-metal performance to our customers and cost efficiency to our business."

"Couchbase's standout performance and near linear horizontal scalability comes from our unique architecture that collapses the caching and database tiers into one system. Triton does something similar at the virtualization tier. By eliminating the need for virtual machine hosts, Triton is able to offer bare-metal performance on containers," said Ravi Mayuram, SVP Products and Engineering, Couchbase. "The combined architectural synergies between these systems will offer the bare metal performance, easy elasticity and simplified deployment demanded by mission critical Couchbase deployments."

Making Containerizing Applications Easy

Containerizing an application or data service on Triton is easy because Triton Infrastructure Containers offer all the services of a typical Unix host and behave similarly to hardware virtual machines:

• Convenient network access for every container: Triton's built-in networking offers each container one or more network interfaces, so each container has a full IP stack and is a full peer on the network.
• Security baked in: Triton Infrastructure Containers are built on Joyent's nearly ten years of experience running containers on multi-tenant bare metal, under persistent security threat, in the Joyent Public Cloud.
• Resource management: No need to worry about one container swamping the resources of a host machine. Patented resource protections insulate containers from noisy neighbors and insure that each container gets its fair share of I/O.

"Most companies are just starting their efforts to Dockerize their applications," said Scott Hammond, CEO of Joyent. "Triton delivers the benefits of containers to all of their Linux applications, even those that have not been 'Dockerized' yet."

"Our team found Triton to work seamlessly with our systems," said Antione Hage, Founder, SOAJS. "Triton is incredibly useful and quickly became indispensable for our worldwide development team."

Through Joyent's expanded participation in the Ubuntu Certified Public Cloud program, Triton Elastic Container Service customers will be able to enjoy the same level of high quality, security and frequent updates that they now enjoy with Ubuntu standard images on Joyent's legacy Compute Service. Additionally, Triton Elastic Container Infrastructure customers will have access to Ubuntu Advantage Support packages from the experts at Canonical that help organizations around the world manage their Ubuntu deployments.