Docker has acquired Infinit, the startup behind a consumer-friendly file transfer app. The new acquisition is aimed to enable secured distributed storage for Docker clients.
As a result of the latest deal, the Infiinit technology will now be a part of the distributed storage feature on Docker. The in-house, end-consumer offering will be available as an “out of the box” solution for enterprises. However, developers will also get an option to integrate its presence into an existing storage system.
“Using their [Infinit] technology, we will provide secure distributed storage out of the box, making it much easier to deploy stateful services and legacy enterprise applications on Docker,” Docker founder and chief technology officer Solomon Hykes wrote in a blog post.
Building portable distributed storage engine
Docker is set to leverage the Infinit resources to build a portable distributed storage engine. This would address the need of making the entire containerised application portable across any infrastructure, including cloud as well as on-premise.
“Stateful applications is the natural next step in this evolution,” said Julien Quintard, CEO and founder of Infinit. “This is where Infinit comes into play, providing the Docker community with a default storage platform for applications to reliably store their state be it for a database, logs, a website’s media files and more.”
Alongside developing a manageable distributed storage engine, Docker is on the move to transform Infinit into a full-fledged open source solution. The underlying code of the app will be released in the coming days to help developers tweak the storage solution.
Full-fledged, next-gen platform
Quintard developed Infinit in partnership with Baptiste Fradin back in 2012. It currently has its presence across Android, iOS, Mac OS and Windows. But the app is also in development to surface as a next-generation storage platform with interfaces for block, object and file storage such as NFS, SMB, AWS S3, OpenStack Swift and FUSE.
