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Docker closes $40M Series C led by Sequoia

135 points by yla92 12y ago

markokrajnc 12y ago
This will help them much with big customers who decide if they should use Docker - because they have now longer-term stability and support.
dschiptsov 12y ago
'Hot' here should be interpreted as a new, fresh, popular meme and buzzword - 'a cool stuff for a cloud - orchestration, you know'. Well, in this way it is hot indeed.
- jacques_chester 12y ago
  Docker doesn't do orchestration and doesn't provide a PaaS. I imagine they'll try to grow in that direction because their customers will hanker for it, but (and I'm biased here because I work for a PaaS developer) they'll find that building automagical distributed platforms is hard. Very hard. Edit: from the blog post -- it looks like moving up into PaaS is their intention.
  - teabee89 12y ago
    Why would Docker sell their dotCloud platform if they wanted to stay in the PaaS business?
    - jacques_chester 12y ago
      God I hate it when people make excellent points directly underneath my remarks.
valarauca1 12y ago
Went to read this blog when I found out blog.docker.com doesn't support TLS 1.2. And only has one available cypher suite TLS_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA Which is cool because RC4 is broken. docker.com actually does support TLS1.2, but their blog subdomain doesn't :\
- ewindisch 12y ago
  Thank you. The blog is on different infrastructure than our website and the DockerHub. We'll look at this pronto! If you discover any other security issues or concerns, please send them to security@docker.com.
  - valarauca1 12y ago
    Yes and thank you for responding quickly to my email.
davidw 12y ago
How do people actually use Docker? In my world of bootstrapped, smaller apps looking for market traction, even if things go well, a few Linodes should be enough to handle most of the traffic I'll ever need to deal with, so this kind of thing is kind of foreign to me. I'm curious how people utilize it in practice.
- golubbe 12y ago
  For a good set of use cases, see https://docker.com/resources/usecases/ https://docker.com/resources/usecases/
  - davidw 12y ago
    Truth be told, to me those are not very meaningful, as those companies operate on a scale, and have requirements that are on another planet from mine. Is Docker useful for people/organizations that are not so large? The other responses seem to think so!
    - ossreality 12y ago
      I guarantee it'd be useful. I guarantee in trying to use it you would find friction in both your day to day dev and deployment cycles. Using docker forces you to write better services that are easier to dev and deploy. And yes, that counts for small projects too. I use docker for my 3 microservice service that runs a single instance on my local box. Still worth it.
- char_pointer 12y ago
  It changes your deployment "atom" so instead of deploying compressed artefacts, you deploy containers. This has some advantages in itself (eg. it makes it easier to do gradual upgrades of your full stack, and you can run containers side by side on the same host), but is especially nice in combination with Mesos and Marathon which enables you to scale out horizontally across your cluster.
- csirac2 12y ago
  I (or rather, jenkins) builds all my software in it, I don't actually use it for containerizing final applications. In a nutshell, for me the value is in trivial repeatability. I can reproduce the entire build toolchain, test environment and produce artifacts all from a few KiB git repo which centres around the Dockerfile and submodules to dependencies. Some of my ARM stuff takes hours to cross-compile and involves enormous amounts of fiddly babysitting normally. Dockerfiles have RUN statements (think lines a shell script) which are cached. My adjustments toward the end of a Dockerfile take only seconds to test and produces the exact same result as if it had really run each statement from the start, which doesn't sound like much but turns out (for me) to be pretty liberating compared to constantly trying to fight other automation where you have to dance around short-circuiting stuff to re-use bits of a past build to save time and get only a handful of "pristine" iterations in a day (that might differ to the iterations you rolled by hand).
jister 12y ago
yep they are hot as in overhyped
notacoward 12y ago
I wonder how much of this was just a way to rearrange who owns how much, ahead of the inevitable acquisition.
golubbe 12y ago
Docker's blog post on this https://blog.docker.com/2014/09/docker-closes-40m-series-c-led-by-sequoia/ https://blog.docker.com/2014/09/docker-closes-40m-series-c-l...
steeve 12y ago
Congrats to all the team!
- nickstinemates 12y ago
  Thank you for being a big part in the community, specifically around boot2docker. You rock!
weavie 12y ago
How are Docker monetizing their product? Is it just in hosting and support? By open sourcing Docker they have opened up the door to hundreds of competitors offering the same thing, often for a much lower cost? Is their only competitive advantage the fact that they own the project and thus understand it better and can dictate its course? I'm sure they would make for a very interesting case study on how to do open source right.
- netcan 12y ago
  Leaving aside some of the macro debating points on open source business models, I'm curious how often this kind of competition has ever become a problem for businesses. Docker aren't the first to create a business around open source software they develop. Has this ever killed a business before?
  - davidw 12y ago
    > Has this ever killed a business before? I think there have been some companies that have died that way, yeah. It's tough to make money from open source, if obviously not impossible. Think how hard it is to get a regular old sell-something-for-money business off the ground, then throw in a way more complicated business model and relationships with community, customers and so on.... it's complicated!
  - nickstinemates 12y ago
    I would look at something like MySQL vs. MariaDB vs. ... as soon as the main shepherd of the project has shown not to have the best interest of the community and ecosystem in mind, a prominent fork gets adopted. It definitely takes time.
- why-el 12y ago
  Docker are doing nothing new. There are few million to a billion dollar open source businesses out there (Red Hat is leading).
- rtkwe 12y ago
  The main way companies building or built around open source products make money is through services and expertise. Companies like Cloudera and RedHat are two prime examples, they're both built around open source projects but still make excellent money because of their service and support abilities.
sillysaurus3 12y ago
This means Sequoia expects Docker to either go public or to be acquired for at least (10 * $40M / sequoia_ownership) in order to be considered a "win," right? (A "win" in the sense of being worth the VC's investment, not in the sense of being valuable to the world.) The reason I say this is because a VC who merely breaks even on investments will eventually go out of business, so it would be a mistake to invest unless the expectation is that Docker might be a win for them. Assuming Sequoia owns, say, 35%, then that comes to an expected acquisition price of about $1.15B for Sequoia to earn 10x their money back. What are some hypothetical scenarios which end with Docker going public? What are some scenarios where a company would acquire Docker for north of $1B? I'm not trying to imply anything about Docker with these questions. Personally, I love Docker. It's just fun to theorycraft.
- ig1 12y ago
  Generally the multiple expected is lower for later stage rounds as there's less risk. Also Sequoia wouldn't have got anywhere near 35%. That said the investors would certainly be looking for >$1bn exit.
  - nickstinemates 12y ago
    > Also Sequoia wouldn't have got anywhere near 35%. Bingo! I don't think anyone would be interested in taking a round that would dilute us this much, especially when the need for money is not pressing.
    - sillysaurus3 12y ago
      The smaller the percentage, the higher the expected acquisition price. For a 10% ownership stake from a $40M investment, the acquisition would need to be $4B just to earn 10x their money back. I was just wondering about some scenarios where Docker could achieve that kind of price.
      - nickstinemates 12y ago
        You haven't taken in to consideration an important variable - how much of the 40M is invested by Sequoia vs. pro rata by existing investors.
droob 12y ago
"the money helps show the market that the company has stability" Free money from some dudes unrelated to the company's business really shouldn't indicate "stability", should it?
mrwizrd 12y ago
Here's a copy of the blog post for anyone having trouble reading. Today is a great day for the Docker team and the whole Docker ecosystem. We are pleased to announce that Docker has closed a $40M Series C funding round led by Sequoia Capital. In addition to giving us significant financial resources, Docker now has the insights and support of a board that includes Benchmark, Greylock, Sequoia, Trinity, and Jerry Yang. This puts us in a great position to invest aggressively in the future of distributed applications. We’ll be able to significantly expand and build the Docker platform and our ecosystem of developers, contributors, and partners, while developing a broader set of solutions for enterprise users. We are also very fortunate that we’ll be gaining the counsel of Bill Coughran, who was the SVP of Engineering at Google for eight years prior to joining Sequoia, and who helped spearhead the extensive adoption of container-based technologies in Google’s infrastructure. While the size, composition, and valuation of the round are great, they are really a lagging indicator of the amazing work done by the Docker team and community. They demonstrate the amazing impact our open source project is having. Our user community has grown exponentially into the millions and we have a constantly expanding network of contributors, partners, and adopters. Search on GitHub, and you’ll now find over 13,000 projects with “Docker” in the title. Docker’s 600 open source contributors can be proud that the Docker platform’s imprint has been so profound, so quickly. Before Docker, containers were viewed as an infrastructure-centric technology that was difficult to implement and remained largely in the purview of web-scale companies. Today, the Docker community has built that low-level technology into the basis of a whole new way to build, ship, and run applications. Looking forward over the next 18 months, we’ll see another Docker-led transformation, this one aimed at the heart of application architecture. This transformation will be a shift from slow-to-evolve, monolithic applications to dynamic, distributed ones. SHIFT IN APPLICATIONS As we see it, apps will increasingly be composed of multiple Dockerized components, capable of being deployed as a logical, Docker unit across any combination of servers, clusters, or data-centers. DISTRIBUTED, DOCKERIZED APPS We’ve already seen large-scale web companies (such as GILT, eBay, Spotify, Yandex, and Baidu) weaving this new flexibility into the fabric of their application teams. At Gilt, for example, Docker functions as a tool of organizational empowerment, allowing small teams to own discrete services which they use to create innovations they can build into production over 100 times a day. Similar initiatives are also underway in more traditional enterprise environments, including many of the largest financial institutions and government agencies. This movement towards distributed applications is evident when we look at the activity within Docker Hub Registry, where developers can actively share and collaborate on Dockerized components. In the three months since its launch, the registry has grown beyond 35,000 Dockerized applications, forming the basis for rapid and flexible composition of distributed applications leveraging a large library of stable, pre-built base images. Future of Distributed Apps: 5 Easy Steps The past 18 months have been largely about creating an interoperable, consistent format around containers, and building an ecosystem of users, tools, platforms, and applications to support that format. Over the next year, you’ll see that effort continue, as we put the proceeds of this round to use in driving advances in multiple areas to fully support multi-Docker container applications. (Look for significant advances in orchestration, clustering, scheduling, storage, and networking.) You’ll also see continued advances in the overall Docker platform–both Docker Hub and Docker Engine. The work and feedback we’ve gotten from our customers as they evolve through these Docker-led transformations has profoundly influenced how Docker itself has evolved. We are deeply grateful for those contributions. The journey we’ve undertaken with our community over the past 18 months has been humbling and thrilling. We are excited and energized for what’s coming next.
a3049073 12y ago
I tried Docker for a little while, just to see what it is. It seems like the authors never used UNIX before. Nonstandard argument format, some strange formatting in the manual page. And the idea of downloading random software from strangers from the internet and running it on your machine creeps me out as well.
- frewsxcv 12y ago
  "And the idea of downloading random software from strangers from the internet and running it on your machine creeps me out as well." Do you compile everything you install from source on your open hardware? If so, you are by far the minority here. If not, you're inconsistent.
- wereHamster 12y ago
  Of course nobody is running random images from the internet in production. You build your own. Building custom images is not rocket science. But to get started with docker it's incredibely easy to download an image and have something running within minutes.
  - ewindisch 12y ago
    I run "random" images. However, I do so by only running automated builds with source code I can (and do) first audit. Some of those images, by the way, are official and provided by the application developer / org.
- nickstinemates 12y ago
  Sorry you had a bad experience. When was the last time you tried Docker? As an example.. > Nonstandard argument format This has changed > some strange formatting in the manual page Also has changed > And the idea of downloading random software from strangers from the internet and running it on your machine creeps me out as well. So you don't use any sort of package management with the distro of your choice? BTW - you don't have to use docker the way you describe. You can `docker import` any rootfs to create a base image and only push/pull images you have created.
sz4kerto 12y ago
It's very interesting to see that Docker is getting so much recognition, money and success -- while the real core of this thing, lxc is rarely mentioned and also the authors are not part of this huge success.
- ad_hominem 12y ago
  Docker doesn't use lxc by default anymore (although you can still run the docker daemon with it if you want). It uses libcontainer, which they wrote: https://github.com/docker/libcontainer https://github.com/docker/libcontainer
  - sz4kerto 12y ago
    Good to know, thanks.
brianbreslin 12y ago
Can someone explain Docker in layman's terms and juxtapose it against something I already understand (aws perhaps)?
- rwmj 12y ago
  chroot?
- taylorbuley 12y ago
  In the naughts, virtualization developed as a software layer to abstract physical hardware and provide so-called "virtual machines" that, instead of working exclusively with hardware, function as a group and share resources as a pool. Docker provides one more layer of abstraction and grouping where a machine (or, commonly, a virtual machine) abstracts its resources in order to provide them to thread-like "containers." These containers share their resources with other containers running on a given host. A docker container, written like a spec into a `Dockerfile`, is a way to package your application as if there was a `run.sh` that would install your OS, any dependencies and your application itself -- and, importantly, run that application after everything is installed. The host can choose to surface to the world any ports on the running container, or keep them private to itself. The container draws from the host's pool of resources so long as your application continues to run inside the "thread" managed by docker.
- SlipperySlope 12y ago
  Docker uses built in features of the Linux kernel to provide namespaces, called containers, in which to run isolated processes. Docker runs on Linux. Each container is built from some Linux distribution in which all system calls are delegated to the underlying Linux. Thus the container is mainly application code as compared to a VM instance in which each instance is a full copy of the OS. Notably, a docker container does not offer a GUI unless you run VNC. So one would not ordinarily develop programs within a container. Docker makes it easy to use features of the Linux kernel that have been around for a while. Expect Microsoft to discover this technique in a couple of years.
- darrelld 12y ago
  Docker is kind of like a virtual machine, except without all the overhead of the operating system so you have a much smaller package. It also uses Linux containers ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LXC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LXC) to help with this process. The overall idea is that I can make an app, use Docker to control things like versions of 3rd party apps that your app relies on. So for a web app I can include the version of MySQL, PHP, Ruby etc that I want, and then distribute a "dockerized" version of the app. Now when I distribute for testing or to other servers I don't need to worry about versions. It just works. At least that's what I gather from reading their site last weekend. I plan to start using it for one of our projects soon.
borplk 12y ago
It's nice to see the folks building the building blocks getting some - financial - attention. Now to yield a nice return on that they just have to turn docker into a ephemeral social photo sharing app for blind vegan Bulldogs and say they want to change the world ;)
- nickstinemates 12y ago
  That's hilarious. :) I think containers as a concept have the chance to really fundamentally change the way applications are developed, delivered, and managed in data centers going forward - whether it's my own little rack sitting in a corner office, or a large scale, multi dc deployment. We're betting on that being Docker, but, the worst thing that could happen is to become complacent and not recognize there's a tremendous amount of work left to do.
  - nomadlogic 12y ago
    Trying not to be a curmudgeon - but I really don't see what the big fuss is about, or how docker is fundamentally changing anything. Not to take anything away from docker being a decent tool in some circumstances - but really this methodology has been around in one implementation for ages on Unix platforms.
    - pbreit 12y ago
      That's sorta where I've been coming up, too. Great, hard working group but docker strikes me as a very small component of the deployment stack, the entirety of which doesn't even have much enterprise value. What would be a good comparison for a component company like this getting to 100s of millions or $1b?
      - ilaksh 12y ago
        LOL. The massive and obvious enterprise value is in having a standard way to deploy and interface isolated Linux applications along with their dependencies, along with a convenient hub for distributing and exchanging them. No, its not the first time any technologies with _some_ these types of capabilities have been available, but it is the first time this powerful combination of those capabilities have come together in a way that has so much momentum.
indielol 12y ago
Docker is one of those FOSS that I always want to actively contribute to, but I don't lest they seem to be doing great without any help.
- nickstinemates 12y ago
  Someone made a contribution earlier today as small as adding a carriage return in an RST file. That is extremely appreciated by everyone. I'd encourage you to jump in. The IRC channel is fairly active and there's a ton of places to get started at all experience levels. Let me know if you need help.
  - jakehow 12y ago
    The stewardship of community contributions seems particularly poor in Docker. One of the more frustrating projects I have tried to help, and is really the only red flag. The promise of docker is awesome. See this thread (and previous discussions around the issue) begging for docker core to participate and getting nowhere for ~1 year: https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/7284 https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/7284 Is there an outline somewhere on your plan for governance and stewardship for community contributions, how proposals move through the pipeline, and whether anyone outside of Docker, Inc has the commit bit?
    - nickstinemates 12y ago
      I'm sorry to hear you've had a frustrating experience. The governance model should be outlined in the CONTRIBUTING.md file located in the repository which should address the concerns. There are project maintainers that are not on the Docker, Inc. payroll, and getting anything committed requires the approval of at least 2. We actually consider this a litmus test for our involvement with the ecosystem, and it's fundamentally a great thing. As for the issue at hand, I personally understand desire on both sides. I have been frustrated multiple times by the lack of being able to have multiple Dockerfiles per repo as a simple example. On the other, providing strict guarantees about context ensures true portability of Dockerfiles. What I will say, is that this is a topic we talk about a lot, whether it be on the issues themselves or in IRC. It's tough to get the right balance.

135 points by yla92 12y ago

This will help them much with big customers who decide if they should use Docker - because they have now longer-term stability and support.

dschiptsov 12y ago

'Hot' here should be interpreted as a new, fresh, popular meme and buzzword - 'a cool stuff for a cloud - orchestration, you know'. Well, in this way it is hot indeed.

jacques_chester 12y ago
Docker doesn't do orchestration and doesn't provide a PaaS. I imagine they'll try to grow in that direction because their customers will hanker for it, but (and I'm biased here because I work for a PaaS developer) they'll find that building automagical distributed platforms is hard. Very hard. Edit: from the blog post -- it looks like moving up into PaaS is their intention.
- teabee89 12y ago
  Why would Docker sell their dotCloud platform if they wanted to stay in the PaaS business?
  - jacques_chester 12y ago
    God I hate it when people make excellent points directly underneath my remarks.

valarauca1 12y ago

Went to read this blog when I found out blog.docker.com doesn't support TLS 1.2. And only has one available cypher suite TLS_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA Which is cool because RC4 is broken. docker.com actually does support TLS1.2, but their blog subdomain doesn't :\

ewindisch 12y ago
Thank you. The blog is on different infrastructure than our website and the DockerHub. We'll look at this pronto! If you discover any other security issues or concerns, please send them to security@docker.com.
- valarauca1 12y ago
  Yes and thank you for responding quickly to my email.

davidw 12y ago

How do people actually use Docker? In my world of bootstrapped, smaller apps looking for market traction, even if things go well, a few Linodes should be enough to handle most of the traffic I'll ever need to deal with, so this kind of thing is kind of foreign to me. I'm curious how people utilize it in practice.

golubbe 12y ago
For a good set of use cases, see https://docker.com/resources/usecases/ https://docker.com/resources/usecases/
- davidw 12y ago
  Truth be told, to me those are not very meaningful, as those companies operate on a scale, and have requirements that are on another planet from mine. Is Docker useful for people/organizations that are not so large? The other responses seem to think so!
  - ossreality 12y ago
    I guarantee it'd be useful. I guarantee in trying to use it you would find friction in both your day to day dev and deployment cycles. Using docker forces you to write better services that are easier to dev and deploy. And yes, that counts for small projects too. I use docker for my 3 microservice service that runs a single instance on my local box. Still worth it.
char_pointer 12y ago
It changes your deployment "atom" so instead of deploying compressed artefacts, you deploy containers. This has some advantages in itself (eg. it makes it easier to do gradual upgrades of your full stack, and you can run containers side by side on the same host), but is especially nice in combination with Mesos and Marathon which enables you to scale out horizontally across your cluster.
csirac2 12y ago
I (or rather, jenkins) builds all my software in it, I don't actually use it for containerizing final applications. In a nutshell, for me the value is in trivial repeatability. I can reproduce the entire build toolchain, test environment and produce artifacts all from a few KiB git repo which centres around the Dockerfile and submodules to dependencies. Some of my ARM stuff takes hours to cross-compile and involves enormous amounts of fiddly babysitting normally. Dockerfiles have RUN statements (think lines a shell script) which are cached. My adjustments toward the end of a Dockerfile take only seconds to test and produces the exact same result as if it had really run each statement from the start, which doesn't sound like much but turns out (for me) to be pretty liberating compared to constantly trying to fight other automation where you have to dance around short-circuiting stuff to re-use bits of a past build to save time and get only a handful of "pristine" iterations in a day (that might differ to the iterations you rolled by hand).

jister 12y ago

yep they are hot as in overhyped

notacoward 12y ago

I wonder how much of this was just a way to rearrange who owns how much, ahead of the inevitable acquisition.

golubbe 12y ago

Docker's blog post on this https://blog.docker.com/2014/09/docker-closes-40m-series-c-led-by-sequoia/ https://blog.docker.com/2014/09/docker-closes-40m-series-c-l...

steeve 12y ago

Congrats to all the team!

nickstinemates 12y ago
Thank you for being a big part in the community, specifically around boot2docker. You rock!

weavie 12y ago

How are Docker monetizing their product? Is it just in hosting and support? By open sourcing Docker they have opened up the door to hundreds of competitors offering the same thing, often for a much lower cost? Is their only competitive advantage the fact that they own the project and thus understand it better and can dictate its course? I'm sure they would make for a very interesting case study on how to do open source right.

netcan 12y ago
Leaving aside some of the macro debating points on open source business models, I'm curious how often this kind of competition has ever become a problem for businesses. Docker aren't the first to create a business around open source software they develop. Has this ever killed a business before?
- davidw 12y ago
  > Has this ever killed a business before? I think there have been some companies that have died that way, yeah. It's tough to make money from open source, if obviously not impossible. Think how hard it is to get a regular old sell-something-for-money business off the ground, then throw in a way more complicated business model and relationships with community, customers and so on.... it's complicated!
- nickstinemates 12y ago
  I would look at something like MySQL vs. MariaDB vs. ... as soon as the main shepherd of the project has shown not to have the best interest of the community and ecosystem in mind, a prominent fork gets adopted. It definitely takes time.
why-el 12y ago
Docker are doing nothing new. There are few million to a billion dollar open source businesses out there (Red Hat is leading).
rtkwe 12y ago
The main way companies building or built around open source products make money is through services and expertise. Companies like Cloudera and RedHat are two prime examples, they're both built around open source projects but still make excellent money because of their service and support abilities.

sillysaurus3 12y ago

This means Sequoia expects Docker to either go public or to be acquired for at least (10 * $40M / sequoia_ownership) in order to be considered a "win," right? (A "win" in the sense of being worth the VC's investment, not in the sense of being valuable to the world.) The reason I say this is because a VC who merely breaks even on investments will eventually go out of business, so it would be a mistake to invest unless the expectation is that Docker might be a win for them. Assuming Sequoia owns, say, 35%, then that comes to an expected acquisition price of about $1.15B for Sequoia to earn 10x their money back. What are some hypothetical scenarios which end with Docker going public? What are some scenarios where a company would acquire Docker for north of $1B? I'm not trying to imply anything about Docker with these questions. Personally, I love Docker. It's just fun to theorycraft.

ig1 12y ago
Generally the multiple expected is lower for later stage rounds as there's less risk. Also Sequoia wouldn't have got anywhere near 35%. That said the investors would certainly be looking for >$1bn exit.
- nickstinemates 12y ago
  > Also Sequoia wouldn't have got anywhere near 35%. Bingo! I don't think anyone would be interested in taking a round that would dilute us this much, especially when the need for money is not pressing.
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    The smaller the percentage, the higher the expected acquisition price. For a 10% ownership stake from a $40M investment, the acquisition would need to be $4B just to earn 10x their money back. I was just wondering about some scenarios where Docker could achieve that kind of price.
    - nickstinemates 12y ago
      You haven't taken in to consideration an important variable - how much of the 40M is invested by Sequoia vs. pro rata by existing investors.

droob 12y ago

"the money helps show the market that the company has stability" Free money from some dudes unrelated to the company's business really shouldn't indicate "stability", should it?

mrwizrd 12y ago

Here's a copy of the blog post for anyone having trouble reading. Today is a great day for the Docker team and the whole Docker ecosystem. We are pleased to announce that Docker has closed a $40M Series C funding round led by Sequoia Capital. In addition to giving us significant financial resources, Docker now has the insights and support of a board that includes Benchmark, Greylock, Sequoia, Trinity, and Jerry Yang. This puts us in a great position to invest aggressively in the future of distributed applications. We’ll be able to significantly expand and build the Docker platform and our ecosystem of developers, contributors, and partners, while developing a broader set of solutions for enterprise users. We are also very fortunate that we’ll be gaining the counsel of Bill Coughran, who was the SVP of Engineering at Google for eight years prior to joining Sequoia, and who helped spearhead the extensive adoption of container-based technologies in Google’s infrastructure. While the size, composition, and valuation of the round are great, they are really a lagging indicator of the amazing work done by the Docker team and community. They demonstrate the amazing impact our open source project is having. Our user community has grown exponentially into the millions and we have a constantly expanding network of contributors, partners, and adopters. Search on GitHub, and you’ll now find over 13,000 projects with “Docker” in the title. Docker’s 600 open source contributors can be proud that the Docker platform’s imprint has been so profound, so quickly. Before Docker, containers were viewed as an infrastructure-centric technology that was difficult to implement and remained largely in the purview of web-scale companies. Today, the Docker community has built that low-level technology into the basis of a whole new way to build, ship, and run applications. Looking forward over the next 18 months, we’ll see another Docker-led transformation, this one aimed at the heart of application architecture. This transformation will be a shift from slow-to-evolve, monolithic applications to dynamic, distributed ones. SHIFT IN APPLICATIONS As we see it, apps will increasingly be composed of multiple Dockerized components, capable of being deployed as a logical, Docker unit across any combination of servers, clusters, or data-centers. DISTRIBUTED, DOCKERIZED APPS We’ve already seen large-scale web companies (such as GILT, eBay, Spotify, Yandex, and Baidu) weaving this new flexibility into the fabric of their application teams. At Gilt, for example, Docker functions as a tool of organizational empowerment, allowing small teams to own discrete services which they use to create innovations they can build into production over 100 times a day. Similar initiatives are also underway in more traditional enterprise environments, including many of the largest financial institutions and government agencies. This movement towards distributed applications is evident when we look at the activity within Docker Hub Registry, where developers can actively share and collaborate on Dockerized components. In the three months since its launch, the registry has grown beyond 35,000 Dockerized applications, forming the basis for rapid and flexible composition of distributed applications leveraging a large library of stable, pre-built base images. Future of Distributed Apps: 5 Easy Steps The past 18 months have been largely about creating an interoperable, consistent format around containers, and building an ecosystem of users, tools, platforms, and applications to support that format. Over the next year, you’ll see that effort continue, as we put the proceeds of this round to use in driving advances in multiple areas to fully support multi-Docker container applications. (Look for significant advances in orchestration, clustering, scheduling, storage, and networking.) You’ll also see continued advances in the overall Docker platform–both Docker Hub and Docker Engine. The work and feedback we’ve gotten from our customers as they evolve through these Docker-led transformations has profoundly influenced how Docker itself has evolved. We are deeply grateful for those contributions. The journey we’ve undertaken with our community over the past 18 months has been humbling and thrilling. We are excited and energized for what’s coming next.

a3049073 12y ago

I tried Docker for a little while, just to see what it is. It seems like the authors never used UNIX before. Nonstandard argument format, some strange formatting in the manual page. And the idea of downloading random software from strangers from the internet and running it on your machine creeps me out as well.

frewsxcv 12y ago
"And the idea of downloading random software from strangers from the internet and running it on your machine creeps me out as well." Do you compile everything you install from source on your open hardware? If so, you are by far the minority here. If not, you're inconsistent.
wereHamster 12y ago
Of course nobody is running random images from the internet in production. You build your own. Building custom images is not rocket science. But to get started with docker it's incredibely easy to download an image and have something running within minutes.
- ewindisch 12y ago
  I run "random" images. However, I do so by only running automated builds with source code I can (and do) first audit. Some of those images, by the way, are official and provided by the application developer / org.
nickstinemates 12y ago
Sorry you had a bad experience. When was the last time you tried Docker? As an example.. > Nonstandard argument format This has changed > some strange formatting in the manual page Also has changed > And the idea of downloading random software from strangers from the internet and running it on your machine creeps me out as well. So you don't use any sort of package management with the distro of your choice? BTW - you don't have to use docker the way you describe. You can `docker import` any rootfs to create a base image and only push/pull images you have created.

sz4kerto 12y ago

It's very interesting to see that Docker is getting so much recognition, money and success -- while the real core of this thing, lxc is rarely mentioned and also the authors are not part of this huge success.

ad_hominem 12y ago
Docker doesn't use lxc by default anymore (although you can still run the docker daemon with it if you want). It uses libcontainer, which they wrote: https://github.com/docker/libcontainer https://github.com/docker/libcontainer
- sz4kerto 12y ago
  Good to know, thanks.

brianbreslin 12y ago

Can someone explain Docker in layman's terms and juxtapose it against something I already understand (aws perhaps)?

rwmj 12y ago
chroot?
taylorbuley 12y ago
In the naughts, virtualization developed as a software layer to abstract physical hardware and provide so-called "virtual machines" that, instead of working exclusively with hardware, function as a group and share resources as a pool. Docker provides one more layer of abstraction and grouping where a machine (or, commonly, a virtual machine) abstracts its resources in order to provide them to thread-like "containers." These containers share their resources with other containers running on a given host. A docker container, written like a spec into a `Dockerfile`, is a way to package your application as if there was a `run.sh` that would install your OS, any dependencies and your application itself -- and, importantly, run that application after everything is installed. The host can choose to surface to the world any ports on the running container, or keep them private to itself. The container draws from the host's pool of resources so long as your application continues to run inside the "thread" managed by docker.
SlipperySlope 12y ago
Docker uses built in features of the Linux kernel to provide namespaces, called containers, in which to run isolated processes. Docker runs on Linux. Each container is built from some Linux distribution in which all system calls are delegated to the underlying Linux. Thus the container is mainly application code as compared to a VM instance in which each instance is a full copy of the OS. Notably, a docker container does not offer a GUI unless you run VNC. So one would not ordinarily develop programs within a container. Docker makes it easy to use features of the Linux kernel that have been around for a while. Expect Microsoft to discover this technique in a couple of years.
darrelld 12y ago
Docker is kind of like a virtual machine, except without all the overhead of the operating system so you have a much smaller package. It also uses Linux containers ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LXC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LXC) to help with this process. The overall idea is that I can make an app, use Docker to control things like versions of 3rd party apps that your app relies on. So for a web app I can include the version of MySQL, PHP, Ruby etc that I want, and then distribute a "dockerized" version of the app. Now when I distribute for testing or to other servers I don't need to worry about versions. It just works. At least that's what I gather from reading their site last weekend. I plan to start using it for one of our projects soon.

borplk 12y ago

It's nice to see the folks building the building blocks getting some - financial - attention. Now to yield a nice return on that they just have to turn docker into a ephemeral social photo sharing app for blind vegan Bulldogs and say they want to change the world ;)

nickstinemates 12y ago
That's hilarious. :) I think containers as a concept have the chance to really fundamentally change the way applications are developed, delivered, and managed in data centers going forward - whether it's my own little rack sitting in a corner office, or a large scale, multi dc deployment. We're betting on that being Docker, but, the worst thing that could happen is to become complacent and not recognize there's a tremendous amount of work left to do.
- nomadlogic 12y ago
  Trying not to be a curmudgeon - but I really don't see what the big fuss is about, or how docker is fundamentally changing anything. Not to take anything away from docker being a decent tool in some circumstances - but really this methodology has been around in one implementation for ages on Unix platforms.
  - pbreit 12y ago
    That's sorta where I've been coming up, too. Great, hard working group but docker strikes me as a very small component of the deployment stack, the entirety of which doesn't even have much enterprise value. What would be a good comparison for a component company like this getting to 100s of millions or $1b?
    - ilaksh 12y ago
      LOL. The massive and obvious enterprise value is in having a standard way to deploy and interface isolated Linux applications along with their dependencies, along with a convenient hub for distributing and exchanging them. No, its not the first time any technologies with _some_ these types of capabilities have been available, but it is the first time this powerful combination of those capabilities have come together in a way that has so much momentum.

indielol 12y ago

Docker is one of those FOSS that I always want to actively contribute to, but I don't lest they seem to be doing great without any help.

nickstinemates 12y ago
Someone made a contribution earlier today as small as adding a carriage return in an RST file. That is extremely appreciated by everyone. I'd encourage you to jump in. The IRC channel is fairly active and there's a ton of places to get started at all experience levels. Let me know if you need help.
- jakehow 12y ago
  The stewardship of community contributions seems particularly poor in Docker. One of the more frustrating projects I have tried to help, and is really the only red flag. The promise of docker is awesome. See this thread (and previous discussions around the issue) begging for docker core to participate and getting nowhere for ~1 year: https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/7284 https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/7284 Is there an outline somewhere on your plan for governance and stewardship for community contributions, how proposals move through the pipeline, and whether anyone outside of Docker, Inc has the commit bit?
  - nickstinemates 12y ago
    I'm sorry to hear you've had a frustrating experience. The governance model should be outlined in the CONTRIBUTING.md file located in the repository which should address the concerns. There are project maintainers that are not on the Docker, Inc. payroll, and getting anything committed requires the approval of at least 2. We actually consider this a litmus test for our involvement with the ecosystem, and it's fundamentally a great thing. As for the issue at hand, I personally understand desire on both sides. I have been frustrated multiple times by the lack of being able to have multiple Dockerfiles per repo as a simple example. On the other, providing strict guarantees about context ensures true portability of Dockerfiles. What I will say, is that this is a topic we talk about a lot, whether it be on the issues themselves or in IRC. It's tough to get the right balance.