Geospatial devkit and ETL* vendor Safe Software has joined the latest big thing in IT with the announcement of a technology preview of its flagship FME Server running in a set of Docker containers. Docker’s technology, a.k.a. ‘Containers as a Service’ provides a managed and secure IT environment where developers can build and deploy their applications. Dockerized software comes as a complete package of code, runtime, system tools and libraries. Docker claims that the approach ‘guarantees that it will always run the same, regardless of the environment.’
Safe Software’s Docker deployment targets developers working on an FME Server* application. A collection of Docker containers make up the FME Server application. This allows for the application to be deployed on platforms that don’t support the required libraries natively. FME Server can now be deployed on a variety of Linux distributions. Docker is also in the process of adding Windows Server support.
Safe Software believes that Docker is the future deployment model for FME Server especially with Microsoft Windows Server 2016 and its native Windows containers. Docker’s impact on Safe’s FME Cloud is ‘likely to be even bigger.’
* ETL stands for extract transform and load. FME, which stands for feature manipulation engine, provides a toolset for ETL and data integration from a wide variety of (especially GIS) data sources.
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