Our journey from office-centric to remote-first

Docker Inc. started like many startups with engineers working from a single location. For us, this was in the Bay Area in the US. We were very office-centric, so the natural way to increase diversity and to get engineers from different cultures to work together was to open new offices in diverse locations. Right from the start, our goal was to mix American and European ways of producing software, giving us the best of both cultures.

Step 1 – Opening European offices

In 2015, Docker started to open offices in Europe, starting with Cambridge in the United Kingdom and followed by Paris in France. With these two locations, the long road to gaining experience working with remote employees began.

Having multiple offices scattered around the world is different from being fully remote. But you still start experiencing some of the challenges of not having everybody in the same location simultaneously. We spent a great deal of our time on planes or trains visiting each other.

Despite the robust open-source culture of the company, which shows that you can build great software while not having everybody in the same room, we still had a very office-centric culture. A lot of the Continue reading

Download and Try the Tech Preview of Docker Desktop for M1

Last week, during the Docker Community All Hands, we announced the availability of a developer preview build of Docker Desktop for Macs running on M1 through the Docker Developer Preview Program. We already have more than 1,000 people testing these builds as of today. If you’re interested in joining the program for future releases you should do it today!

As I’m sure you know by now, Apple has recently shipped the first Macs based on the new Apple M1 chips. Last month my colleague Ben shared our roadmap for building a Docker Desktop that runs on this new hardware. And I’m delighted to tell you that today we have a public preview that you can download and try out.

Like many of you, we at Docker have been super excited to receive and code with these new computers: they just feel so fast! We also know that Docker Desktop is a key part of the development cycle for over 3M developers using Docker Desktop with over half of you on Macs. To support all our Mac users we’ve been working hard to get Docker Desktop ready to run on the new M1 hardware. It is not release quality yet, or Continue reading

Docker Hub Image Retention Policy Delayed, Subscription Updates

Today we are announcing that we are pausing enforcement of the changes to image retention until mid 2021. Two months ago, we announced a change to Docker image retention policies to reduce overall resource consumption. As originally stated, this change, which was set to take effect on November 1, 2020, would result in the deletion of images for free Docker account users after six months of inactivity. After this announcement, we heard feedback from many members of the Docker community about challenges this posed, in terms of adjusting to the policy without visibility as well as tooling needed to manage an organization’s Docker Hub images. Today’s announcement means Docker will not enforce image expiration enforcement on November 1. Instead, Docker is focusing on consumption-based subscriptions that meet the needs of all of our customers. In this model, as the needs of a developer grow, they can upgrade to a subscription that meets their requirements without limits.

This change means that developers will get a base level of consumption to start, and can extend their subscriptions as their needs grow and evolve, only paying for what is actually needed. The community of 6.7 million registered Docker developers is incredibly diverse–the Continue reading

Scaling Docker to Serve Millions More Developers: Network Egress

In Part 1 of this blog we went into a deep dive that analyzed all of the images stored in Docker Hub, the world’s largest container registry. We did this to give you a better understanding of how our new Terms of Service updates will impact development teams who use Docker Hub to manage their container images and CI/CD pipelines.

Part 2 of this blog post takes a deep dive into rate limits for container image pulls. This was also announced as part of our updated Docker Terms of Service (ToS) communications. We detailed the following pull rate limits to Docker subscription plans that will take effect November 1, 2020:

• Free plan – anonymous users: 100 pulls per 6 hours 
• Free plan – authenticated users: 200 pulls per 6 hours
• Pro plan – unlimited
• Team plan – unlimited

Docker defines pull rate limits as the number of manifest requests to Docker Hub. Rate limits for Docker image pulls are based on the account type of the user requesting the image – not the account type of the image’s owner. For anonymous (unauthenticated) users, pull rates are limited based on the individual IP address. 

We’ve been getting questions from customers Continue reading

Scaling Docker’s Business to Serve Millions More Developers: Storage

At Docker, our mission is to enable developers worldwide to quickly bring their ideas to life by reducing the complexity of application development. While over 6.5 million registered Docker developers are enjoying the benefits of Docker today, we want to scale Docker’s business to the tens of millions of developers who are just discovering Docker. Offering free tools and services is a cornerstone of our mission, and these are funded by our paid subscription services.

In this blog series, we will deep dive into why and how the recently announced Terms of Service changes were introduced. This blog, Part 1, will explore the inactive image retention policy and how it will impact development teams who use Docker Hub for managing their container images. Part 2 will focus on the new rate limits policies that were introduced for image pulls.

A deeper look at Docker Hub images

Delivering containerized applications in a portable, secure, and resource efficient manner also requires tools and services for securely storing and sharing applications with your development team. Today, Docker is proud to offer the world’s largest container registry, Docker Hub, which is used by over 6.5 million developers around the world. Over 15 Continue reading