If your data center were a beehive, Docker Swarm would be the pheromone that keeps all the bees working efficiently together.

Docker Shipyard is a handy tool for people who love Docker Swarm, but wish it did even more. While Swarm focuses on container orchestration through the CLI, Docker Shipyard takes things further by letting you manage app images and container registries in addition to containers themselves. Plus, Shipyard offers a Web-based graphical front-end and a rich API in addition to a CLI.

LXC and LXD are two important acronyms to know if you’re into containers. Unfortunately, they’re also acronyms that are hard to keep straight from one another. They sound alike. They refer to similar platforms, which were created in large part by the same company. And they’re deeply intertwined with one another at a technical level.