Scott Johnston

Author Archives: Scott Johnston

Docker Series B: More Fuel To Help Dev Teams Get Ship Done

Today we’re excited and humbled to announce Docker’s Series B raise of $23 million to accelerate our mission of delivering tools development teams love to quickly take their ideas from code to cloud. The round was led by Tribe Capital with participation from our existing investors, Benchmark and Insight Partners. Arjun Sethi, Tribe co-founder and partner, will join the Docker board. 

This would not have been possible without the Docker team: Thank you for giving each other your best, every day, despite the disruptions of the refocusing, the pandemic, the overnight switch to work-from-home, and so much more. We also thank our developer community of users, contributors, customers, partners, and Docker Captains – your enthusiastic engagement throughout this past year was invaluable.

Hit Refresh

Tribe sees in Docker what we saw in November 2019 when we refocused the company: the opportunity to build on the bottoms-up developer love of the Docker experience and provide a collaborative app development platform for development teams to accelerate getting their ideas from code to cloud. And that’s just what we did.

Key inputs to Tribe’s investment decision were our results this last year, which included attracting 80,000 developer participants to DockerCon 2020, adding Continue reading

Top Developer Trends for 2021

The year 2020 will go down in the history books for so many reasons. For Docker, despite the challenges of our November 2019 restructuring, we were fortunate to see 70% growth in activity from our 11.3 million monthly active users sharing 7.9 million apps pulled 13.6 billion times per month. Thank you, Docker team, community, customers, and partners!

But with 2020 behind us it’s natural to ask, “What’s next?” Here in the second week of January, we couldn’t be more excited about 2021. Why? Because the step-function shift from offline to online of every dimension of human activity brought about by the global pandemic is accelerating opportunities and challenges for development teams. What are the key trends relevant to development teams in 2021? Here are our top picks:

The New Normal: Open, Distributed Collaboration

While already a familiar teamwork model for many open source projects and Internet companies, the global pandemic seemingly overnight drove all software development teams to adopt new ways of working together. In fact, our 2020 survey of thousands of Docker developers about their ways of working found that 51% prefer to work mostly remote and only sometimes in an office if/when given Continue reading

Docker’s Next Chapter: Our First Year

2020 has been quite the year. Pandemic, lockdowns, virtual conferences and back-to-back Zoom meetings. Global economic pressures, confinement and webcams aside, we at Docker have been focused on delivering what we set out to do when we announced Docker’s Next Chapter: Advancing Developer Workflows for Modern Apps last November 2019. I wish to thank the Docker team for their “can do!” spirit and efforts throughout this unprecedented year, as well as our community, our Docker Captains, our ecosystem partners, and our customers for their non-stop enthusiasm and support. We could not have had the year we had without you.

This next chapter is being jointly written with you, the developer, as so much of our motivation and inspiration comes from your sharing with us how you’re using Docker. Consider the Washington University School of Medicine (WUSM): WUSM’s team of bioinformatics developers uses Docker to build pipelines – consisting of up to 25 Docker images in some cases – for analyzing the genome sequence data of cancer patients to inform diagnosis and treatments. Furthermore, they collaborate with each other internally and with other cancer research institutions by sharing their Docker images through Docker Hub. In the words of WUSM’s Dr. Continue reading

Update from Docker on COVID-19 Actions

As the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 continues to spread, Docker has been taking precautionary measures to support the health, well-being, and safety of our global team members and their families, as well as ensuring our customers and community at large can continue building and shipping apps using Docker. We are also following the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines, as well as guidelines from local public health administrations. 

Docker has always been about community, and here are the steps we have taken to ensure employees are taken care of as well as to ensure business continuity for our users worldwide:

Protecting Employees

  • On March 2, 2020, we asked all global employees to cancel or postpone any non-essential, work-related travel. 
  • Additionally, on March 9, 2020, we closed all of our offices globally to employees and visitors. We are using all available technologies like our phones, Zoom, Slack, GitHub, and Confluence now that we have transitioned to a fully remote workforce. 
  • While Docker is a geographically distributed organization, we understand this is a big shift for many of our employees and, as such, we are encouraging as much flexibility around work Continue reading

Helping Developers Simplify Apps, Toolchains, and Open Source

It’s been an exciting four months since we announced that Docker is refocusing on developers. We have spent much of that time listening to you, our developer community, in meetups, on GitHub, through social media, with our Docker Captains, and in face-to-face one-on-ones. Your support and feedback on our refocused direction have been helpful and positive, and we’re fired-up for the year ahead!

What’s driving our enthusiasm for making developers successful? Quite simply, it’s in recognition of the enormous impact your creativity – manifested in the applications you ship – has on all of our lives. Widespread adoption of smartphones and near-pervasive Internet connectivity only accelerates consumer demand for new applications. And businesses recognize that applications are key to engaging their customers, partnering effectively with their supply chain ecosystem, and empowering their employees.

As a result, the demand for developers has never been higher. The current worldwide population of 18 million developers is growing approximately 20% every year (in contrast to the 0.6% annual growth of the overall US labor force). Yet, despite this torrid growth, demand for developers in 2020 will outstrip supply by an estimated 1 million. Thus, we see tremendous opportunities in helping every developer to Continue reading

Docker’s Next Chapter: Advancing Developer Workflows for Modern Apps

Today we start the next chapter in the Docker story, one that’s focused on developers. That we have the opportunity to write this next chapter is thanks to you, our community, for without you we wouldn’t be here. And while our focus on developers builds on recent history, it’s a focus also grounded in Docker’s beginning.

In The Beginning

When Solomon Hykes, Docker’s founder, unveiled the Docker project in 2013, he succinctly stated the problem Docker aimed to solve as, “for a developer, shipping code to the server is hard.” To address, Docker abstracted out OS kernels’ complex container primitives, provided a developer-friendly, CLI-based workflow and defined an immutable, portable image format. The result transformed how developers work, making it much easier to build, ship and run their apps on any server. So while container primitives had existed for decades, Docker democratized them and made them as easy to use as

docker run hello-world

The rest is history. Over the last six years, Docker containerization catalyzed the growth of microservices-based applications, enabled development teams to ship apps many times faster and accelerated the migration of apps from the data center to the cloud. Far from a Docker-only effort, a Continue reading

The Docker Modernize Traditional Apps (MTA) Program Adds Microsoft Azure Stack

In April of this year, Docker announced the Modernize Traditional Apps (MTA) POC program with partners Avanade, Booz Allen, Cisco, HPE and Microsoft. The MTA program is designed to help IT teams flip the 80% maintenance to 20% innovation ratio on it’s head. The combination of Docker Enterprise Edition (EE), services and infrastructure into a turnkey program delivers portability, security and efficiency for the existing app portfolio to drive down total costs and make room for innovation like cloud strategies and new app development. The program starts by packaging of existing apps into isolated containers, providing the opportunity to migrate them to new on-prem or cloud environments, without any recoding.

 

Docker customers have already been taking advantage of the program to jumpstart their migration to Azure and are experiencing dramatically reduced deployment and scaling times — from weeks to minutes —  and cutting their total costs by 50% or more.

 

The general availability of Microsoft Azure Stack provides IT with the ability to manage their datacenters in the same way they manage Azure. The consistency in hybrid cloud infrastructure deployment combined with consistency in application packaging, deployment and management only further enhance operational efficiency. Docker is pleased Continue reading

Introducing the Modernize Traditional Apps Program

Today at DockerCon, we announced the Modernize Traditional Applications (MTA) Program to help enterprises make their existing legacy apps more secure, more efficient and portable to hybrid cloud infrastructure.  Collaboratively developed and brought to market with partners Avanade, Cisco, HPE, and Microsoft, the MTA Program consists of consulting services, Docker Enterprise Edition, and hybrid cloud infrastructure from partners to modernize existing .NET Windows or Java Linux applications in five days or less.  Designed for IT operations teams, the MTA Program modernizes existing legacy applications without modifying source code or re-architecting the application.

Modernize Traditional Apps with Docker

The First Step In The Microservices Journey

In working with hundreds of our enterprise IT customers the last couple years, when we sit down with them one of the first questions they inevitably ask is, “What is the first step we should take toward microservices?”

Through experience we have found that, for the vast majority of them, the best answer is, “Start with what you have today – with your existing applications.”   Why is this the right place for them to start?  Because it recognizes two realities facing enterprise IT organizations today: existing applications consume 80% of IT budgets, and most IT organizations responsible for existing Continue reading

Docker Announces Commercial Partnership with Microsoft to Double Container Market by Extending Docker Engine to Windows Server

With industry analysts declaring Windows Server with more than 60% of the x86 server market, and citing Microsoft Azure as the fastest-growing public cloud, it comes as no surprise that Microsoft, even at its current scale, is further extending its leadership as a strategic, trusted partner to enterprise IT.

It is this industry leadership that catalyzed our technical collaboration in the Docker open source project back in October 2014, to jointly bring the agility, portability, and security benefits of the Docker platform to Windows Server.  After two years of joint engineering, we are excited to unveil a new, commercial partnership to extend these benefits for both Windows developers targeting Windows Server and enterprise IT professionals.

Specifically, the commercial partnership entails:

  • The Commercially Supported Docker Engine aka “CS Docker Engine”, Docker, Inc.’s tested, validated, and supported package of Docker Engine, will be available to Windows Server 2016 customers at no additional cost
  • Microsoft will provide Windows Server 2016 customers enterprise support for CS Docker Engine, backed by Docker, Inc
  • Docker and Microsoft will jointly promote Docker Datacenter to enable IT Pros to secure the Windows Server software supply chain and manage containerized Windows Server workloads, whether on-prem, in the Continue reading

Docker: Ready for Production

DockerCon Day 1 was filled with several exciting announcements, including the Open Container Project, Docker Network, Docker Platform 1.7, and container runtime runC.  DockerCon Day 2 builds on this, with an emphasis on the solutions that we are building on that complement the … Continued

Docker Hub Official Repos: Announcing Language Stacks

shipping-containers

With Docker containers fast becoming the standard for building blocks for distributed apps, we’re working with the Docker community to make it easier for users to quickly code and assemble their projects.  Official Repos, publicly downloadable for free from the Docker Hub Registry, are curated images informed by user feedback and best practices.  They represent a focused community effort to provide great base images for applications, so developers and sysadmins can focus on building new features and functionality while minimizing repetitive work on commodity scaffolding and plumbing.

At DockerCon last June, we announced the first batch of Official Repos which covered many standard tools like OS distributions, web servers, and databases.  At the time, we had several organizations join us to curate Official Repos for their particular project, including Fedora, CentOS, and Canonical.  And the community responded enthusiastically as well: in the three months since they launched, Official Repos have so grown in popularity that they now account for almost 20% of all image downloads.

Parlez-vous…?

Based on the search queries on the Docker Hub Registry and discussions with many of you, we determined that the community wants pre-built stacks of their favorite programming languages.  Specifically, developers Continue reading

Docker & VMware: 1 + 1 = 3

BLOG-POST-VMWARE Today at VMworld we’re excited to announce a broad partnership with VMware.  The objective is to provide enterprise IT customers with joint solutions that combine the application lifecycle speed and environment interoperability of the Docker platform with the security, reliability, and management of VMware infrastructure.  To deliver this “better together” solution to customers, Docker and VMware are collaborating on a wide range of product, sales, and marketing initiatives. Why join forces now?  In its first 12 months Docker usage rapidly spread among startups and early adopters who valued the platform’s ability to separate the concerns of application development management from those of infrastructure provisioning, configuration, and operations.  Docker gave these early users a new, faster way to build distributed apps as well as a “write once, run anywhere” choice of deployment from laptops to bare metal to VMs to private and public clouds.  These benefits have been widely welcomed and embraced, as reflected in some of our adoption metrics:

  • 13 million downloads of the Docker Engine
  • 30,000 “Dockerized” applications on Docker Hub
  • 14,000 stars on GitHub
  • 570 contributors

In its second year, Docker usage continues to spread and is now experiencing mass adoption by enterprise IT organizations.  These organizations span Continue reading