One challenge of developing software that will be deployed to virtualized or cloud infrastructure is accounting for the differences between local development, QA and production environments. An exciting new project that aims to address this challenge (among others) is Docker.
From the Docker homepage: “Docker is an open-source project to easily create lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale, in production, on VMs, bare metal, OpenStack clusters, public clouds and more.”
Docker is still under heavy development and not ready for production use (yet), but certainly shows a lot of promise. We’ll be eagerly watching the progress on this project.