Chris Ciborowski is the founder and managing partner of Nebulaworks, an engineering consultancy focused on application delivery. A version of this post originally appeared on his blog.

Back in the day, it was all about working on big iron running UNIX for me, a badge of honor if you will. E10K, check. E25K, check. There was some great technology there, including DTrace and ZFS, but also Zones. Zones are an OS virtualization layer that should be familiar to those who've worked with FreeBSD jails before.

Fast forward 11 years, and Docker has re-energized the OS virtualization movement. And rightly so. But now, we are looking at it from the eyes of the developer. And for distributed microservices-based applications they are ideally suited. While running these containers on a laptop is trivial, but taking a number of containers and running them on a scalable platform in production is a different story altogether.

By now you are probably asking how this relates to Joyent. And that is a good question. Short answer: Joyent has been using containers in production for a long, long time. Not Docker containers, but Zones. This makes them uniquely qualified, with real-world understanding of production concerns and with insight on the best way to develop a foundation for running Docker containers. And now they have. They are calling their container runtime Triton. Triton, a Greek mythological god was half man, half fish: the best of both worlds.

Joyent's Triton is an infrastructure which is robust and well suited to container deployment, providing not only a Docker API, but also ZFS and DTrace support enabling the launch and operation of the best container packaging technology: Docker.

I am not going to dive into the details of how Triton works, but I have put together a small demo of setting up the environment to connect to the Triton service, and some commands illustrating how it responds to the Docker commands just like a native Linux-based Docker engine.

Sit back, grab a coffee and watch this 16 minute screencast of Joyent Triton:

Editor's note: see Triton preview instructions and pricing details.