Servers: Containers, SOA, Microservices, and 'Cloud'

Today marks an important milestone for the Open Container Initiative (OCI) with the release of the OCI v1.0 runtime and image specifications – a journey that Docker has been central in driving and navigating over the last two years. It has been our goal to provide low-level standards as building blocks for the community, customers and the broader industry. To understand the significance of this milestone, let’s take a look at the history of Docker’s growth and progress in developing industry-standard container technologies.

For those that have been in the technology industry for some time, there is a tendency to compare or even equate the current microservices phenomenon with the more archaic Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach. This is done implicitly in many cases, but also quite explicitly with statements such as “microservices is nothing more than the new SOA” or “Amazon is the only company to get SOA right.”

This is unsurprising, because it’s rooted in fact. For all of its other faults, SOA was a vision of enterprises that looks remarkably like what progressive organizations are building today with cloud native architectures composed of, among other things, microservices. Stripped to its core, SOA was the idea that architectures should be composed of services rather than monolithic applications.

With the addition of Google Cloud Platform, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications is now available on three major public cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.