Docker has released Docker Enterprise Edition 17.06, with new support for Windows Server 2016 and IBM Z mainframe. With the inclusion of support for these new platforms, the Docker Blog states that Docker EE now delivers a consistent experience across Linux, Windows, and Linux-on-mainframe applications, and is a "solution for modernizing Windows, Linux, and mainframe applications across on-premises and cloud, without requiring code changes."
Docker EE is the commercial offering of the container technology and associated management and control plane suite from Docker Inc, and is functionally equivalent to the corresponding Docker CE that it references (the full release notes for Docker CE 17.06 can be found in the Docker Documentation). However, Docker EE also includes backported fixes for both security and priority defects from the open source code base i.e. defect fixes are incorporated that can be used in environments where new features cannot be adopted as quickly for consistency and compatibility reasons.
Docker EE 17.06 includes support for full lifecycle management of Docker Windows containers including image scanning, secrets management, and overlay networking. Also included is the ability to orchestrate across mixed clusters of Windows, Linux, and mainframe worker nodes, and the potential to integrate Windows and Linux applications through the use of overlay networking to support hybrid applications. This release also includes Universal Control Plane (UCP) 2.2 and Docker Trusted Registry (DTR) 2.3.
New features in UCP 2.2 include: the role-based access control (RBAC) system has been overhauled for additional granularity and customization; UCP now provides access control for nodes, where an admin can enforce physical isolation between users on different nodes in the cluster (this required an Docker EE advanced license); support for UCP workers running Windows Server 2016, and the ability to deploy Windows-based containerized applications on the cluster; support for UCP workers running on IBM Z systems with RHEL 7.3, Ubuntu 16.04, and SLES 12; and a redesigned UI for ease-of-use and data management.
DTR 2.3 now includes: repositories can now be marked "immutable" and tags for images in immutable repos cannot be changed or updated; promotion policies can now be defined to automatically copy images from one repository to another; functionality for easily creating webhooks for events in repositories such as image pushes, scans, deletions, and promotions; added support for scanning Windows images for vulnerabilities; and support was added for handling manifest-lists for multi-architecture images that enables images for different operating systems (eg. Linux and Windows) and CPU architectures (eg. x86_64 and s390x) to be managed under a single tag.
It should be noted that Docker 17.06 by default disables communication with legacy (v1) registries. If interaction is required with registries that have not yet migrated to the v2 protocol, set the --disable-legacy-registry=false daemon option. Interaction with v1 registries will be removed in Docker 17.12.
Additional information on the release of Docker EE 17.06 can be found on the Docker Blog or the release notes.