10 ms·

Docker Raises $15M

333 points by ssclafani 13y ago

voltagex_ 13y ago
Congratulations to the Docker team and contributors!
nickstinemates 13y ago
Very exciting!
veesahni 13y ago
Excited to see Docker's rapid climb. This is the right product at the right time.
patio11 13y ago
That's exciting. I looked at Docker briefly, and it has the "Ooh, cool project, can envision the potential" bit in spades but unfortunately is at that unhappy stage of maturity where e.g. betting AR's future on it not blowing up or shutting down would be a bit more risky than the benefits currently warrant. I'm really looking forward to when it's production-ready.
- shykes 13y ago
  In addition to the funding, we have bet on a Linux-style development model where the project is not just open source but open design: ownership is federated across key individuals with strong ownership over particular subsystems, with very low barriers to entry and a diversity of employers. This is one of the reasons Red Hat felt comfortable betting on it so quickly - and you should expect other major industry players to folluw suit this year :)
  - patio11 13y ago
    That's awesome, and I can respect that you're trying to tell me "We are trying to make Docker the project survivable even in the event of Docker, Inc ceasing to operate as a going concern.", and I have much less stringent requirements for maturity than the Fortune 500, but... As one geek to another, the thing which stops me from Dockering up my entire infrastructure in February is that: of that NxN compatibility matrix that Docker will some day liberate me from, I feel like I'm going to be the first production system in a lot of the cells, I will have to replace my existing cobbled-together infrastructure which I know to be borderline functional with hand-rolled work to Dockerize it, and I figure that when there are inevitably bugs I will be the one to weep tears of blood about them. When this is no longer true, I'm so there.
    - shykes 13y ago
      Coming from the ex-CEO of a 24/7 managed hosted service... I absolutely hear you! So, we'll simply work our buts off to make the risk/reward more and more appealing for you... And in the meantime we would love to go over your particular stack and tell you how far off we are. Apparently we can afford a team of solutions engineers to do that now :) If you're interested feel free to ping me at solomon@docker.com. I would be honored to explore your cobbled-together infrastructure!
    - nl 13y ago
      I will have to replace my existing cobbled-together infrastructure which I know to be borderline functional with hand-rolled work to Dockerize it I think you'll find a lot of core pieces of infrastructure end up being Dockerized for you.
    - thu 13y ago
      I know the feel about taking some unnecessary risk, but still you will certainly not be the first to try to clean the floor: A lot of people are actively using Docker right now. For instance I'm building https://reesd.com https://reesd.com on it (i.e. I don't have a prior system that I replace). Getting a few bugs from Docker is not different to me than getting a few bugs from my own systems. I write my integration tests and move along. Other people are further along the road building a lot of different things, trying a lot of different ideas. I would think that unless you're doing something radically different, a lot of ground has already been covered (and will be covered until you have completely switched to Docker). Another reason I was not afraid of Docker is that it is built around existing pieces. For instance some people say "Docker is just a script around the lxc tools, what's the point". That, in my opinion, is reassuring. If I need to, I will be able to drop to the next layer, or another similar project will take over. So I think it is already/almost no longer true.
    - speleding 13y ago
      I'm in the same boat: I think this has huge potential but with my skill set it would not be wise for my company to be a trailblazer on ops. @shykes: What would convince me is one or two blog posts from respected members of the community (patio11 comes to mind :-) where they detail a successful transition to use Docker in their infrastructure.
jamtur01 13y ago
Woot! Very excited! :)
hkmurakami 13y ago
Awesome to see them doing well and excited to see what they do with the extra ammo :)
druska 13y ago
This is one of those few projects that everyone is really excited about. Docker will change many aspects of software development for the better.
xissy 13y ago
Sometimes I've thought what might be the next GitHub. The answer is Docker. Can't imagine to develop, test and deploy without Docker totally.
galenko 13y ago
Not to take away from Docker's achievements (seriously, well done), but it's a funny world we live in, Docker gets 15M (or "another startup casually gets $XXM), while OpenBSD foundation (which pays for stuff all of us rely on every day) have to beg for donations and 100k is a huge achievement.
- bertil 13y ago
  Well, 15M gives investors control, and (even out over several investments) reasonable likelihood of profit. But, then again, you point out a great idea: to somehow tie large investments and open source projets. I'm not sure entrepreneurs who struggle getting funding would want to had one more stone to their neck, but it would be great PR to have either a repeated entrepreneur, or an accelerator, lock x% of the funds they raise to donation.
  - jamiequint 13y ago
    >> 15M gives investors control Without inside information you have no idea if this is true or not. It may very well not be. Facebook raised over 2 Billion prior to their IPO and never gave up control. $XXm Investment != Control.
    - nickstinemates 13y ago
      You're on the right track :)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- epistasis 13y ago
  I feel similarly. Docker's founders deserve only congratulations, they're doing a cool thing and asking for money for it. And Linux's terrible and primitive containerization technologies are finally growing up to be able to match Solaris and FreeBSD. But I don't find "funny" strong enough a word when OpenBSD, which is IMHO a far more fundamental and important technology than containerization and should be easier to monetize than Docker, is struggling to survive. I think it comes down to the personalities of the leadership, and where they want to take the projects. But it's a crying shame that OpenBSD is struggling. Not related at all to Docker, but a shame none the less.
shykes 13y ago
Hey everybody, Solomon from team Docker. We're all lurking here and are happy to answer questions. Just so you know I conzider Hacker News to be a key part in Docker's success. Your feedback, both positive and negative, made us feel like we weren't crazy and were building something that mattered. I hope in the end you will feel we live up to the expectations :) We have lots of really cool things in store this year, I hope you will like them. Happy hacking on behalf of the entire Docker team and contributors.
- jacksoncage 13y ago
  Keep up the great work!
- dkural 13y ago
  Hi Solomon. Congrats on the round. We're building on top of Docker a reproducable genomics platform at Seven Bridges Genomics. For us, Docker makes science and healthcare reproducible. Let's brainstorm on how we can bring wider visibility to Docker in that vertical :)
  - shykes 13y ago
    Hey, that sounds like a really great project. I would love to hear more! Feel free to email me at solomon@docker.com
  - JunkDNA 13y ago
    I'm working in the genomics space as well. We have an open source interface for filtering and examining variants for clinical diagnostics called Varify. We presented a poster at ASHG and are trying to get the open source code we have out on github documented and installable (https://github.com/cbmi/varify https://github.com/cbmi/varify). My experience is that most of the analysis companies have the final variant display, filtration, and reporting as a gap in their capabilities and don't have the time or resources to devote to it 100%. Clinical diagnostics (where we are focused) has very different usage scenarios from discovery work, so it may not be a good fit depending on your focus. Regardless, I'd love to hear about your experience with Docker and NGS pipeline work. Looked at your profile but there was no email. Shoot me a note if you want to chat (email is in my profile).
tongqi 13y ago
Excellent!
bevenky 13y ago
Great to see a YC company raise the next round with an open source pivot. Would be interesting to see how this pans out. Great job Solomon and team. I am all for you guys!
unohoo 13y ago
Congrats Docker team. Docker is an amazing product and I've been following it closely as well as playing with the latest version. Not one bit of the hype is vaporware. Cant wait for it to get a little more production ready. I'm sure anyone who has done even a small amount of dev-ops can appreciate what a huge pain point docker will solve. VM's have been commoditized, but with docker, they can be obliterated altogether. One question I have for Solomon -- do you guys have a product roadmap on the site anywhere ? As in, what features are planned etc. and by what release/time ?
- shykes 13y ago
  Thanks for the kind words! Yes, we are actually working on exposing our high-level roadmap publicly. We are currently testing a public Trello board, but the choice of tool is not yet final. All of this is being discussed openly on the #docker and #docker-dev IRC channels on Freenode. Feel free to jump in and say hi!
- jamtur01 13y ago
  This blog post on the road to Docker 1.0 will also give you an idea of what we have planned albeit the timelines might be a little different: http://blog.docker.io/2013/08/getting-to-docker-1-0/ http://blog.docker.io/2013/08/getting-to-docker-1-0/.
nikita 13y ago
Congratulations Solomon and the team. We use docker every day. Thanks for all your hard work!
dclara 13y ago
Well accepted.
ed_blackburn 13y ago
Just need to persuade Microsoft to add the container facility to the Windows Kernel now... Seriously, if MS can be persuaded that this appraoch is beneficial for their ecosystem too, then everyone is a winner!
- teh_klev 13y ago
  Though not quite the same, IIS application pool isolation (separate app pool and worker process for each website - which is the default from IIS7+) gets you a bit of the way there. This has improved security, performance and reliability massively for us. But yes, speaking as a shared webhoster devops kinda guy, I agree, it would be nice to have containers on Windows too.
davidw 13y ago
So... I'm quite sleep deprived due to a sick kid (nothing serious) and haven't really followed Docker much in any case. Why would I "Dockerize" my infrastructure, and what benefits and challenges does that entail? I mostly do fairly simple RoR web apps that run on something like Linode.
- eli 13y ago
  I'm not sure this has a one sentence answer: http://www.docker.io/the_whole_story/ http://www.docker.io/the_whole_story/
- calgaryeng 13y ago
  http://lmgtfy.com/?q=why+use+docker http://lmgtfy.com/?q=why+use+docker
  - davidw 13y ago
    That's not a very helpful reply, really, as a lot of the first hits on Google are kind of vague, and I have no idea whether the whole thing really applies to what I do in any case.
steeve 13y ago
Well done guys :)
alexismp 13y ago
The Apache 2 license is great and using a DCO sounds great. Is the project Governance documented somewhere? Congrats on the amazing achievements so far!
- nickstinemates 13y ago
  Yes, check out CONTRIBUTING.md in the root of the Docker project.
  - alexismp 13y ago
    thanks but I was more hoping for something describing the process used to decide if/how/when to incorporate pull requests, roadmap, software quality before releasing, ... Do maintainers discuss to reach consensus, do they vote, something else? It could be that this is all Docker Inc's prerogative, which is fine. I just don't see it spelled out.
    - shykes 13y ago
      Check out https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/blob/master/hack/MAINTAINERS.md https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/blob/master/hack/MAINTAIN... And in general the rest of that hack/ directory. We use a process that is completely open and not at all limited to Docker, inc. Several core maintainers (and countless contributors) are not employed at Docker inc. Generally speaking the reference for how we organize is Linux.
      - alexismp 13y ago
        thanks, this clarifies it!
losvedir 13y ago
I've been watching this Docker excitement with interest, and went through the little demo thing on their website (which was quite cool!), but still have trouble connecting the dots on how exactly I'd use it. I run your standard Heroku/PG/RoR web-stack app. Is anyone else using Docker in that environment? I was vaguely thinking we could set up a Vagrant + Docker combo for our development team to manage dependencies of gems and native apps and whatnot. Is that how Docker is used? Would getting set up on Docker now make an eventual transition to, say, AWS or self-hosting later easier? I'd love to hear examples from how people with a similar tech stack are using Docker.
- tonyhb 13y ago
  Yeah, the Vagrant + Docker use case is how I'm using it. This is the flow that I'm pushing my company to use: * CoreOS/Vagrant * Docker containers with basic infrastructure (eg LAMP/Ruby+Postgres) * Containers 'forked' for each client (and company project) * Central container repo for the team to use As soon as CoreOS is ready for production we're going to look at using it for deployment. We might not be using it 100% correctly, but so far it's nothing short of amazing. The basic 'git for OS' flow I get out if it makes me smile every time. Dockerfiles are way, way, way easier than Chef, Puppet or Ansibke, and the central repo is a synch to picture and imagine in comparison.
  - mechanical_fish 13y ago
    So, you're not running Docker in production at this point? Are you putting the whole stack in one big container and running one container per Vagrant VM? Or are you spreading a client stack across multiple containers?
kclay 13y ago
That was quick, Congratulations.
xiaohanzhang14 13y ago
Am I the only one who thought this article was gonna be about chinos?
lquist 13y ago
A friend of mine recently asked me "I'm looking for a job. If my only criterion (it isn't) was which companies are most likely to 10x in value in a few years, which companies would those be?" My answer was Docker and Oculus VR.

Docker Raises $15M

333 points by ssclafani 13y ago

voltagex_ 13y ago

Congratulations to the Docker team and contributors!

nickstinemates 13y ago

Very exciting!

veesahni 13y ago

Excited to see Docker's rapid climb. This is the right product at the right time.

patio11 13y ago

That's exciting. I looked at Docker briefly, and it has the "Ooh, cool project, can envision the potential" bit in spades but unfortunately is at that unhappy stage of maturity where e.g. betting AR's future on it not blowing up or shutting down would be a bit more risky than the benefits currently warrant. I'm really looking forward to when it's production-ready.

shykes 13y ago
In addition to the funding, we have bet on a Linux-style development model where the project is not just open source but open design: ownership is federated across key individuals with strong ownership over particular subsystems, with very low barriers to entry and a diversity of employers. This is one of the reasons Red Hat felt comfortable betting on it so quickly - and you should expect other major industry players to folluw suit this year :)
- patio11 13y ago
  That's awesome, and I can respect that you're trying to tell me "We are trying to make Docker the project survivable even in the event of Docker, Inc ceasing to operate as a going concern.", and I have much less stringent requirements for maturity than the Fortune 500, but... As one geek to another, the thing which stops me from Dockering up my entire infrastructure in February is that: of that NxN compatibility matrix that Docker will some day liberate me from, I feel like I'm going to be the first production system in a lot of the cells, I will have to replace my existing cobbled-together infrastructure which I know to be borderline functional with hand-rolled work to Dockerize it, and I figure that when there are inevitably bugs I will be the one to weep tears of blood about them. When this is no longer true, I'm so there.
  - shykes 13y ago
    Coming from the ex-CEO of a 24/7 managed hosted service... I absolutely hear you! So, we'll simply work our buts off to make the risk/reward more and more appealing for you... And in the meantime we would love to go over your particular stack and tell you how far off we are. Apparently we can afford a team of solutions engineers to do that now :) If you're interested feel free to ping me at solomon@docker.com. I would be honored to explore your cobbled-together infrastructure!
  - nl 13y ago
    I will have to replace my existing cobbled-together infrastructure which I know to be borderline functional with hand-rolled work to Dockerize it I think you'll find a lot of core pieces of infrastructure end up being Dockerized for you.
  - thu 13y ago
    I know the feel about taking some unnecessary risk, but still you will certainly not be the first to try to clean the floor: A lot of people are actively using Docker right now. For instance I'm building https://reesd.com https://reesd.com on it (i.e. I don't have a prior system that I replace). Getting a few bugs from Docker is not different to me than getting a few bugs from my own systems. I write my integration tests and move along. Other people are further along the road building a lot of different things, trying a lot of different ideas. I would think that unless you're doing something radically different, a lot of ground has already been covered (and will be covered until you have completely switched to Docker). Another reason I was not afraid of Docker is that it is built around existing pieces. For instance some people say "Docker is just a script around the lxc tools, what's the point". That, in my opinion, is reassuring. If I need to, I will be able to drop to the next layer, or another similar project will take over. So I think it is already/almost no longer true.
  - speleding 13y ago
    I'm in the same boat: I think this has huge potential but with my skill set it would not be wise for my company to be a trailblazer on ops. @shykes: What would convince me is one or two blog posts from respected members of the community (patio11 comes to mind :-) where they detail a successful transition to use Docker in their infrastructure.

jamtur01 13y ago

Woot! Very excited! :)

hkmurakami 13y ago

Awesome to see them doing well and excited to see what they do with the extra ammo :)

druska 13y ago

This is one of those few projects that everyone is really excited about. Docker will change many aspects of software development for the better.

xissy 13y ago

Sometimes I've thought what might be the next GitHub. The answer is Docker. Can't imagine to develop, test and deploy without Docker totally.

galenko 13y ago

Not to take away from Docker's achievements (seriously, well done), but it's a funny world we live in, Docker gets 15M (or "another startup casually gets $XXM), while OpenBSD foundation (which pays for stuff all of us rely on every day) have to beg for donations and 100k is a huge achievement.

bertil 13y ago
Well, 15M gives investors control, and (even out over several investments) reasonable likelihood of profit. But, then again, you point out a great idea: to somehow tie large investments and open source projets. I'm not sure entrepreneurs who struggle getting funding would want to had one more stone to their neck, but it would be great PR to have either a repeated entrepreneur, or an accelerator, lock x% of the funds they raise to donation.
- jamiequint 13y ago
  >> 15M gives investors control Without inside information you have no idea if this is true or not. It may very well not be. Facebook raised over 2 Billion prior to their IPO and never gave up control. $XXm Investment != Control.
  - nickstinemates 13y ago
    You're on the right track :)
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
epistasis 13y ago
I feel similarly. Docker's founders deserve only congratulations, they're doing a cool thing and asking for money for it. And Linux's terrible and primitive containerization technologies are finally growing up to be able to match Solaris and FreeBSD. But I don't find "funny" strong enough a word when OpenBSD, which is IMHO a far more fundamental and important technology than containerization and should be easier to monetize than Docker, is struggling to survive. I think it comes down to the personalities of the leadership, and where they want to take the projects. But it's a crying shame that OpenBSD is struggling. Not related at all to Docker, but a shame none the less.

shykes 13y ago

Hey everybody, Solomon from team Docker. We're all lurking here and are happy to answer questions. Just so you know I conzider Hacker News to be a key part in Docker's success. Your feedback, both positive and negative, made us feel like we weren't crazy and were building something that mattered. I hope in the end you will feel we live up to the expectations :) We have lots of really cool things in store this year, I hope you will like them. Happy hacking on behalf of the entire Docker team and contributors.

jacksoncage 13y ago
Keep up the great work!
dkural 13y ago
Hi Solomon. Congrats on the round. We're building on top of Docker a reproducable genomics platform at Seven Bridges Genomics. For us, Docker makes science and healthcare reproducible. Let's brainstorm on how we can bring wider visibility to Docker in that vertical :)
- shykes 13y ago
  Hey, that sounds like a really great project. I would love to hear more! Feel free to email me at solomon@docker.com
- JunkDNA 13y ago
  I'm working in the genomics space as well. We have an open source interface for filtering and examining variants for clinical diagnostics called Varify. We presented a poster at ASHG and are trying to get the open source code we have out on github documented and installable (https://github.com/cbmi/varify https://github.com/cbmi/varify). My experience is that most of the analysis companies have the final variant display, filtration, and reporting as a gap in their capabilities and don't have the time or resources to devote to it 100%. Clinical diagnostics (where we are focused) has very different usage scenarios from discovery work, so it may not be a good fit depending on your focus. Regardless, I'd love to hear about your experience with Docker and NGS pipeline work. Looked at your profile but there was no email. Shoot me a note if you want to chat (email is in my profile).

tongqi 13y ago

Excellent!

bevenky 13y ago

Great to see a YC company raise the next round with an open source pivot. Would be interesting to see how this pans out. Great job Solomon and team. I am all for you guys!

unohoo 13y ago

Congrats Docker team. Docker is an amazing product and I've been following it closely as well as playing with the latest version. Not one bit of the hype is vaporware. Cant wait for it to get a little more production ready. I'm sure anyone who has done even a small amount of dev-ops can appreciate what a huge pain point docker will solve. VM's have been commoditized, but with docker, they can be obliterated altogether. One question I have for Solomon -- do you guys have a product roadmap on the site anywhere ? As in, what features are planned etc. and by what release/time ?

shykes 13y ago
Thanks for the kind words! Yes, we are actually working on exposing our high-level roadmap publicly. We are currently testing a public Trello board, but the choice of tool is not yet final. All of this is being discussed openly on the #docker and #docker-dev IRC channels on Freenode. Feel free to jump in and say hi!
jamtur01 13y ago
This blog post on the road to Docker 1.0 will also give you an idea of what we have planned albeit the timelines might be a little different: http://blog.docker.io/2013/08/getting-to-docker-1-0/ http://blog.docker.io/2013/08/getting-to-docker-1-0/.

nikita 13y ago

Congratulations Solomon and the team. We use docker every day. Thanks for all your hard work!

dclara 13y ago

Well accepted.

ed_blackburn 13y ago

Just need to persuade Microsoft to add the container facility to the Windows Kernel now... Seriously, if MS can be persuaded that this appraoch is beneficial for their ecosystem too, then everyone is a winner!

teh_klev 13y ago
Though not quite the same, IIS application pool isolation (separate app pool and worker process for each website - which is the default from IIS7+) gets you a bit of the way there. This has improved security, performance and reliability massively for us. But yes, speaking as a shared webhoster devops kinda guy, I agree, it would be nice to have containers on Windows too.

davidw 13y ago

So... I'm quite sleep deprived due to a sick kid (nothing serious) and haven't really followed Docker much in any case. Why would I "Dockerize" my infrastructure, and what benefits and challenges does that entail? I mostly do fairly simple RoR web apps that run on something like Linode.

eli 13y ago
I'm not sure this has a one sentence answer: http://www.docker.io/the_whole_story/ http://www.docker.io/the_whole_story/
calgaryeng 13y ago
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=why+use+docker http://lmgtfy.com/?q=why+use+docker
- davidw 13y ago
  That's not a very helpful reply, really, as a lot of the first hits on Google are kind of vague, and I have no idea whether the whole thing really applies to what I do in any case.

steeve 13y ago

Well done guys :)

alexismp 13y ago

The Apache 2 license is great and using a DCO sounds great. Is the project Governance documented somewhere? Congrats on the amazing achievements so far!

nickstinemates 13y ago
Yes, check out CONTRIBUTING.md in the root of the Docker project.
- alexismp 13y ago
  thanks but I was more hoping for something describing the process used to decide if/how/when to incorporate pull requests, roadmap, software quality before releasing, ... Do maintainers discuss to reach consensus, do they vote, something else? It could be that this is all Docker Inc's prerogative, which is fine. I just don't see it spelled out.
  - shykes 13y ago
    Check out https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/blob/master/hack/MAINTAINERS.md https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/blob/master/hack/MAINTAIN... And in general the rest of that hack/ directory. We use a process that is completely open and not at all limited to Docker, inc. Several core maintainers (and countless contributors) are not employed at Docker inc. Generally speaking the reference for how we organize is Linux.
    - alexismp 13y ago
      thanks, this clarifies it!

losvedir 13y ago

I've been watching this Docker excitement with interest, and went through the little demo thing on their website (which was quite cool!), but still have trouble connecting the dots on how exactly I'd use it. I run your standard Heroku/PG/RoR web-stack app. Is anyone else using Docker in that environment? I was vaguely thinking we could set up a Vagrant + Docker combo for our development team to manage dependencies of gems and native apps and whatnot. Is that how Docker is used? Would getting set up on Docker now make an eventual transition to, say, AWS or self-hosting later easier? I'd love to hear examples from how people with a similar tech stack are using Docker.

tonyhb 13y ago
Yeah, the Vagrant + Docker use case is how I'm using it. This is the flow that I'm pushing my company to use: * CoreOS/Vagrant * Docker containers with basic infrastructure (eg LAMP/Ruby+Postgres) * Containers 'forked' for each client (and company project) * Central container repo for the team to use As soon as CoreOS is ready for production we're going to look at using it for deployment. We might not be using it 100% correctly, but so far it's nothing short of amazing. The basic 'git for OS' flow I get out if it makes me smile every time. Dockerfiles are way, way, way easier than Chef, Puppet or Ansibke, and the central repo is a synch to picture and imagine in comparison.
- mechanical_fish 13y ago
  So, you're not running Docker in production at this point? Are you putting the whole stack in one big container and running one container per Vagrant VM? Or are you spreading a client stack across multiple containers?

kclay 13y ago

That was quick, Congratulations.

xiaohanzhang14 13y ago

Am I the only one who thought this article was gonna be about chinos?

lquist 13y ago

A friend of mine recently asked me "I'm looking for a job. If my only criterion (it isn't) was which companies are most likely to 10x in value in a few years, which companies would those be?" My answer was Docker and Oculus VR.