Cloudera Partners with Docker, Inc. to Provide the First Commercially-Supported Secure Containers

I’ve been asked a lot of questions recently about an announcement last week regarding a partnership to provide secure containers to the United States Public Sector market. We’ve been working on something that may seem similar to other security offerings for over a year. I want to clarify the difference between the Cloudera/Docker, Inc. offering and other offerings in the general market.  It is a unique collaboration that results in a net-new product for the market. Though our core product, the Enterprise Data Hub, has a role to play in modern data management we are not announcing support for running CDH/EDH inside Docker containers.

Cloudera has a corporate-to-corporate agreement with Docker, Inc. and, while both of our platforms are built on open source technologies, we have created a fully supported secure container early access product. This product benefits greatly from roadmap alignment from both companies. It is in contrast to other offerings that are simply waiting for open source updates upstream and reacting to changes in Docker’s product.

The integrated solution is based on Cloudera Navigator Encrypt running on Docker’s CS Engine. Docker has security products also (Trusted Registry, etc.) and aligning these security concerns has been a tough, but exciting journey. For example, both our companies have integrated 17 code-level changes since January 2016. It’s far beyond simply downloading open source and bolting on encryption.

Docker and Cloudera worked in close collaboration to meet the specific needs of U.S. government agencies. Because these agencies often have sensitive workloads where portability and security are necessary, the two companies worked together on an integration that would protect the code and data running in containerized workloads. Docker and Cloudera made sure that all data and code are protected both in transit, at rest, and at runtime.