When I joined Joyent this past summer, two things were clear to me. First, that Docker had sparked a “container revolution” that would define the next era of cloud and infrastructure management. And, second, that the battle-tested, infrastructure container technology that underpins the Joyent Public Cloud and private cloud software solution, Joyent SmartDataCenter, could become the best run-time environment for Docker application containers.

To make Joyent the best place to run Docker, we needed to do two things. First, we needed to provide developers and ops teams a complete solution for running Docker hosts and containers - a solution that pulled together the best available Docker management tools into a pre-integrated and easy to use service. Today we took a large step forward in our quest for holistic simplicity with the introduction of the Joyent Container Service, combining Docker and leading open source container management technologies, like cAdvisor for performance analytics, Docker private registries, and Joyent’s own Manta for log management, into a complete and easy to use service.

Holistic simplicity alone, however, isn’t enough to be able to claim that Joyent is the best place to run Docker. We also needed to provide an infrastructure container run-time environment superior to the good enough, “batteries included” option provided by Docker. So, we set out to seamlessly integrate Docker into Joyent SmartDataCenter, the container infrastructure run-time environment used today by Joyent customers to power their mission critical applications across thousands of infrastructure containers in the Joyent Public Cloud, and the foundation for container-based, private clouds at some of the world’s most recognizable companies.

Now, through our work (in the open) to extend the Docker Engine to SmartDataCenter and enhance SmartDataCenter with Linux Branded Zones, we are nearing our goal of providing “Dockerized” Linux applications a run-time environment that is secure, delivers both bare metal performance and cloud economics, provides integrated virtual networking and virtual storage, and is available via a public cloud service or private cloud software download.

There is much work still to be done, and many ways we can and will improve upon our initial offerings. But, given what I’ve seen the Joyent product and engineering team produce over the past several months (and years), I am confident that we are well on our way to truly becoming the best place to run Docker.