Giving developers speed, security, and choice

While we’re pleased with this recognition, for us it means we cannot slow down: We need to go even faster in our effort to serve developers. In what ways? Well, our developer community tells us they value speed, security, and choice:

• Speed: Developers want to maximize their time writing code for their app — and minimize set-up and overhead — so they can ship early and often.
• Security: Specifically, non-intrusive, informative, and actionable security. Developers want to catch and fix vulnerabilities right now when coding in their “inner loop,” not 30 minutes later in CI or seven days later in production.
• Choice: Developers want the freedom to explore new technologies and select the right tool for the right job and not be constrained to use lowest-common-denominator technologies in “everything-but-the-kitchen-sink” monolithic tools.

And indeed, these are the “North Stars” that inform our roadmap and prioritize our product development efforts. Recent examples include:

Speed

• Docker Init: Automatically generates Dockerfiles and docker-compose.yml files for Python, Node, and Go apps.
• VirtioFS support: 98% reduction in database import time.
• Docker Compose file watch: Automatically detects and syncs local host code changes with the container.
• vpnkit => gVisor: 5X faster container-to-host networking performance.

Security

• Docker Scout: Automatically detects vulnerabilities and recommends fixes while devs are coding in their “inner loop.”
• Attestations: Docker Build automatically generates SBOMs and SLSA Provenance and attaches them to the image.

Choice

• Docker Extensions: Launched just over a year ago, and since then, partners and community members have created and published to Docker Hub more than 700 Docker Extensions for a wide range of developer tools covering Kubernetes app development, security, observability, and more.
• Docker-Sponsored Open Source Projects: Available 100% for free on Docker Hub, this sponsorship program supports more than 600 open source community projects.
• Multiple architectures: A single docker build command can produce an image that runs on multiple architectures, including x86, ARM, RISC-V, and even IBM mainframes.

What’s next?

While we’re pleased that our efforts have been well-received by our developer community, we’re not slowing down. So many exciting changes in our industry today present us with new opportunities to serve developers.

For example, the lines between the local developer laptop and the cloud are becoming increasingly blurred. This offers opportunities to combine the power of the cloud with the convenience and low latency of local development. Another example is AI/ML. Specifically, LLMs in feedback loops with users offer opportunities to automate more tasks to further reduce the toil on developers.

Watch these spaces — we’re looking forward to sharing more with you soon.

Thank you!

Docker only exists because of our community of developers, Docker Captains and Community Leaders, customers, and partners, and we’re grateful for your on-going support as reflected in this year’s Stack Overflow survey results. On behalf of everyone here at Team Docker: THANK YOU. And we look forward to continuing to build the future together with you.

Learn more

• Get the latest release of Docker Desktop.
• Vote on what’s next! Check out our public roadmap.
• Have questions? The Docker community is here to help.
• New to Docker? Get started.

It’s Red Hat Summit week, and we wanted to use this as an opportunity to highlight several aspects of Docker’s partnership with Red Hat. In this post, we highlight Docker Hub and Red Hat’s Universal Base Images (UBI). Also check out our new post on simplifying Kubernetes development with Docker Desktop + Red Hat OpenShift.

Docker Hub is the world’s largest public registry of artifacts for developers, providing the fundamental building blocks — web servers, runtimes, databases, and more — for any application. It offers more than 15 million images for containers, serverless functions, and Wasm with support for multiple operating systems (Linux, Windows) and architectures (x86, ARM). Altogether, these 15 million images are pulled more than 16 billion times per month by over 20 million IPs.

While the majority of the 15 million images are community images, a subset are trusted content, both open source and commercial, curated and actively maintained by Docker and upstream open source communities and Docker’s ISV partners.

Docker and Red Hat have been partners since 2013, and Red Hat started distributing Linux images through Docker Hub in 2014. To help developers reduce the “works on my machine” finger-pointing and ensure consistency between development and production environments, in 2019 Red Hat launched Universal Base Image (UBI). Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), UBI provides the same reliability, security, and performance as RHEL. Furthermore, to meet the different use cases of developers and ISVs, UBI comes in four sizes — standard, minimal, multi-service, and micro — and offers channels so that additional packages can be added as needed.

Given Docker’s reach in the developer community and the breadth and depth of developer content on Docker Hub, Docker and Red Hat agreed that distributing Red Hat UBI on Docker Hub made a lot of sense. Thus, in May 2021 Red Hat became a Docker Verified Publisher (DVP) and launched Red Hat UBIs on Docker Hub. As a DVP, Red Hat’s UBIs are easier for developers to discover, and it gives developers an extra level of assurance that the images they’re using are accessible, safe, and maintained.

The results? Tens of 1000s of developers are pulling Red Hat UBI millions of times every month. Furthermore, the pulls of Red Hat Universal Base image have grown 2.6X times in the last 12 months alone. Such growth points to value Docker and Red Hat together bring to the developer community.

… and we’re not finished! Having provided Red Hat UBIs directly to developers, now Docker and Red Hat are working together with Docker’s ISV partners and open source communities to bring the value of UBI to those software stacks as well. Stay tuned for more!

Learn More

• Docker Verified Publisher (DVP)
• Red Hat Universal Base Images (UBIs)
• Docker Official Images (DOI)
• Docker-sponsored Open Source (DSOS)

• If you’re currently on the Free Team plan, you no longer have to migrate to another plan by April 14. 
• Customers who upgraded from a Free Team subscription to a paid subscription between the sunsetting announcement on March 14 and today’s announcement will automatically receive a full refund for the transaction in the next 30 days, allowing them to use their new paid subscription for free for the duration of the term they purchased.
• Customers who requested a migration to a Personal or Pro plan will be kept on their current Free Team plan. (Or they can choose to open a new Personal or Pro account via our website.)
• In the past 10 days we received & accepted more applications for our Docker-Sponsored Open Source program (DSOS) than we did in the previous year. We encourage eligible open source projects to continue to apply and are currently processing applications within a couple of business days.

For more details, you can visit our FAQ. We apologize for both the communications and the policy, and vow to be an ever-more trustworthy community member in the future.

If you have any questions, you’re welcome to contact me directly on Twitter @scottcjohnston or by emailing scott@docker.com.

What’s driving this growth? It’s the global demand for new applications, and Docker gives developers the speed, the choice in tools and deployment, and the security they need to meet this demand. Today at DockerCon you’ll hear many stories from developers about the challenges they faced and how they addressed them with Docker.

To give developers more speed and more choice, today at DockerCon we’re announcing Docker Extensions, the easiest, fastest way for developers to discover, integrate, and start using ecosystem partner tools to build modern apps. Docker Senior Product Manager Amy Bass penned a blog post overview of Docker Extensions, the developer use cases they address, and the 15 Docker Extension launch partners. Check it out here.

Continuing to provide developers choice, today at DockerCon we also announced Docker Desktop for Linux. Docker Desktop has been available for Mac and Windows workstation developers for years and offers them:

• One-click install and config of open source app development tools, including the Docker Engine, Kubernetes, Docker CLI, Docker Compose, BuildKit, and more;
• Automatic, incremental functional and security updates;
• An integrated, managed, and secured Linux VM for running tools and containers; and
• Integration with the Mac and Windows host filesystems and networking stacks.

With today’s launch of Docker Desktop for Linux, we’re bringing these benefits to Linux workstation developers (and delivering on one of the top-requested features from our public product roadmap). Check-out Docker Senior Product Manager Chris McLellan’s blog post to learn more.

Docker Extensions and Docker Desktop for Linux are just two of the more than 7000+ new features, fixes, and updates we’ve shipped to developers these last 12 months. In addition, we’re providing 14 PB storage, 35 million Docker Engine downloads per month, and 31 PB of network egress per month … 100% free to developers.

Why? Because we want to make Docker accessible to all developers. While the market today stands at 26 million developers, it is expected to grow to 45 million by the end of this decade. And by our estimates more than 80% of developers continue to use Docker Desktop for free. Less than 20% of developers work for large companies, and for those companies using Docker for production applications and needing more visibility, manageability, and security for the 100s or 1000s of developers using Docker, they purchase a Docker subscription. This allows us to hire more engineers to build more features for developers, faster, and to grow our business sustainably.

With the developer market growing to 45 million developers this decade, growing Docker sustainably allows us to serve every developer, current and future. Sustainability means more than simply free access to Docker: it means enabling the next generation of developers to explore areas like AI/ML, serverless/FaaS, WASM, Web3 and more with the Docker tools, skills, and standards they already know. The DockerCon team has built this year’s agenda specifically to help developers ship today’s apps faster as well as to help them prepare for the future.

DockerCon is by developers, for developers, and, eight years in, we continue to be impressed by the creativity and openness of this community. We’re looking forward to a great day!

Learn More

• Blog: Docker Extensions: Discover, Build & Integrate New Tools into Docker Desktop
• Blog: The Magic of Docker Desktop is Now Available on Linux

Fast forward to today, and thanks to Solomon, hundreds of Docker employees past and present, and millions of developers, community members, contributors, customers, and partners, we are able to celebrate Docker’s ninth birthday and can look forward to many more to come. And while our journey these last nine years has been anything but a straight line, our re-focusing in 2019 on the needs of developers is starting to bear fruit across our community, product, customers, and business.

Sustainably growing Docker was the critical desired outcome of our re-focusing in 2019. The changes we’ve made to our product, pricing, and licensing since then have enabled us to sustainably grow the business while continuing to grow the Docker developer community. To wit, growing sustainably enables us to continue to serve 100% for free 10 million registered Docker developers, 35 million Docker Engine downloads / month, 14 PB of container image storage, 31 PB / month in container image network egress, and much more.

In addition to investing in the community, sustainably growing our business enables us to increase our investment in our product for developers. Since 2019, you’ve seen us consistently deliver against our public product roadmap – most recently Docker Desktop for Linux and a 6X improvement in performance in Docker Desktop for Mac – and there’s much more to come! Be sure to swing by the Docker Community All Hands on March 31 for more birthday celebrations and exciting announcements, and there’s even more to share at DockerCon on May 10.

Happy ninth birthday, Docker community! Here’s to many more years in which we together build, share, and run!

sj

DockerCon Live 2022  

Join us for DockerCon Live 2022 on Tuesday, May 10. DockerCon Live is a free, one day virtual event that is a unique experience for developers and development teams who are building the next generation of modern applications. If you want to learn about how to go from code to cloud fast and how to solve your development challenges, DockerCon Live 2022 offers engaging live content to help you build, share and run your applications. Register today at https://www.docker.com/dockercon/

Docker stands with the members in our Ukrainian community and the sovereign nation of Ukraine. As the situation continues to evolve, we want to provide an update on Docker’s response. We will not do business with Russian and Belarusian companies or accept payments from these locations during this period. As such, we have removed the ability to purchase and renew Docker subscriptions from Russia and Belarus. We are continuing to monitor the situation and will keep you informed with updates from Docker. 

Additionally, we are committed to supporting Ukraine’s fight for continued sovereignty and independence. On behalf of all Docker employees, we are making donations to UNICEF , Razom and Doctors without Borders earmarked to help Ukrainian citizens. 

#StandWithUkraine

• Shipping 7,000+ product features, fixes, and updates to developers, including Docker Desktop for M1 Macs, Docker Compose v2, NVIDIA GPU support, single sign-on, BuildKit speed-ups, Docker Development Environments, multi-platform builds, image access management, rapid updates for Log4Shell, audit logs, and much more;
• Growing our Docker community of developers to more than 15 million monthly active users from 200+ countries, including over 80,000 participants in DockerCon 2021;
• Welcoming new partners who provide trusted content for our developers – more than 1,200 open source and commercial publishers across Docker Official Images, Docker Verified Publisher images, and Docker-sponsored open source projects;
• Accelerating our annual recurring revenue (ARR) to over $50 million, representing more than 4X year-over-year growth. This helps us make Docker a lasting, sustainable business able to scale to meet the needs of tens of millions of developers.

Support from Docker customers is driving rapid growth in our business which, in turn, is enabling us to accelerate investment in our product. As a result, you’ve seen us pull forward the delivery of popular public roadmap items including Docker Desktop for Linux, filesystem performance improvements, pause / resume, and more.

None of this would have been possible without the tremendous efforts of the Docker team, past and present. From a place of much risk and uncertainty in November 2019, we have come together as a team to focus on developers, ship products they love to use, and build a company and culture to bring out everyone’s best. To wit, over the last year we’ve seen employee engagement increase by 16% and retention increase by 23%.

Finally, we thank the Docker community of developers, Docker Captains, partners, and customers – your support this past fiscal year was critical to our success. We’re far from finished, and we’ve got a lot cookin’ in 2022! We look forward to seeing you and sharing more at Docker’s 9th Birthday Party in March and DockerCon 2022 in May!

Learn More

• Docker public roadmap on GitHub
• Accelerating New Features in Docker Desktop
• Docker’s Next Chapter

DockerCon2022

Join us for DockerCon2022 on Tuesday, May 10. DockerCon is a free, one day virtual event that is a unique experience for developers and development teams who are building the next generation of modern applications. If you want to learn about how to go from code to cloud fast and how to solve your development challenges, DockerCon 2022 offers engaging live content to help you build, share and run your applications. Register today at https://www.docker.com/dockercon/

And throughout all these ups and downs the Docker team stayed the course. I thank them for their unwavering focus on serving our developer community. And I thank our Docker Captains, our community leaders, our ecosystem partners, our customers and the wider Docker community for their feedback, loyalty, and trust. Your support these last two years enabled us to not just survive, but to thrive.

Delivering Collaboration, Speed, and Security for Developers

The global tragedy of the pandemic accelerated digital initiatives in every industry while the “new normal” of work-from-home raised the importance of collaboration within “virtual-first” development teams. In response, to simplify the complexities of modern app development facing these teams we shipped Docker Development Environments. With it, team members can quickly and easily share with each other reproducible development environments, enabling them to spend more time writing code instead of installing tools, setting environment variables, and untangling dependencies.

This “need for speed” triggered by the pandemic is somewhat addressed by the decade-long rise in custom silicon. Yet how can developers take advantage of custom silicon performance without re-writing their applications or learning unfamiliar tools? Since our re-focusing in November 2019 we’ve shipped new capabilities that address this challenge, including support for Arm-based Apple M1 silicon in Docker Desktop, NVIDIA GPU support in Docker Desktop and Docker Compose-to-AWS, and RISC-V support in BuildKit. In doing so, we’re helping developers to get the speed benefits of custom silicon “for free” without having to make changes to their app or learn a new toolchain.

Sadly, the rise in online activity catalyzed by the pandemic is attracting the attention of criminals, resulting in an increase in the frequency and sophistication of attacks on organizations’ software supply chains. For this challenge, given the heterogeneity of customers’ environments Docker and our partners have taken a multi-vendor, open standards-based approach. This includes delivering CNCF-based Notary v2 for digital signatures, Docker Hub-interoperable container registry partnerships with AWS, Mirantis, and JFrog, and trusted content partnerships with Canonical, Red Hat, VMware, and other leading commercial ISVs.

The results? More development teams than ever are using Docker as the fastest, most secure way to build, share, and run modern applications. In fact, since our refocusing on developers two years ago our community has grown to 15.4 million monthly active developers sharing 13.7 million apps at a rate of 14.7 billion pulls per month. Moreover, for the second year in a row Stack Overflow’s Developer Survey ranked Docker as the #1 most wanted development tool, and JetBrains’ annual survey rated Docker Compose as the most popular container development tool, used by 58% of respondents.

We’re Just Getting Started

While we’re humbled by the results of these first two years, we also believe we’re just getting started – there’s still so much to do. In particular, the pandemic-triggered demand for apps is accelerating the demand for developer talent. Specifically, the demand for developers is growing 8X faster than the average demand for other occupations, with the market projected to be 45 million developers by the end of this decade. What are the implications for our industry and for Docker?

First, to state the obvious, more developers means more apps. And whether it’s the modernization of traditional apps or the creation of new, Kubernetes-destined ones both mean increased complexity. The result is a larger attack surface of software supply chains for criminals to attack.

With our presence at both ends of the supply chain, Docker is uniquely positioned to help. As the source of trusted content at the beginning of the supply chain – Docker Official Images, Docker Verified Publisher images of commercial ISV partners, and Docker-sponsored open source projects – developers can trust the foundational building blocks of their apps from the start. On the other end of the supply chain, Docker Desktop, we’re providing tools for developers to discover trusted content, verify its integrity, and ensure its ongoing freshness. And for their managers, we give them SaaS-delivered visibility and controls for images pulled from registries as well as created within Docker Desktop. This allows development teams to ship quickly and safely – no need to trade one off for the other.

Second, increasingly developers want the freedom to choose best-of-breed tools in order to take advantage of the latest innovations in app development. In working with ecosystem partners on open standards like OCI, compose-spec, CNCF Distribution, and others, we’ve delivered innovation for developers such as Compose-to-cloud tooling for AWS and Azure, image build automations with GitHub and Bitbucket repos and GitHub Actions, image vulnerability scanning with Snyk, and more.

Going forward, so as to provide developers even more choice in ecosystem partner tools we are making it even easier for partners to integrate with Docker tools, services, and content by expanding the breadth and depth of our product interfaces. Around this we are providing discovery and assurance services so that developers know these ecosystem partner integrations are safe, maintained, and supported. Furthermore, our SaaS-delivered management plane gives managers visibility into integration usage and a means to set and enforce integrations policy. This combination gives developers the freedom to choose their tools, safely.

Third, daily more and more developers are joining hundreds of thousands of Docker community members freely sharing with each other their time, expertise, and joy in using Docker for app development. And whether it’s our public roadmap, awesome-compose contributions, community Slack, community meetups, or 80,000-participant DockerCons you’ll find a friendly, enthusiastic crowd. Moreover, it’s a community that welcomes newcomers just getting started, and thus plays an important role in sustainably scaling Docker adoption as tens of millions more new developers join the community in the years to come.

But besides stars and reviews on image repos on Docker Hub, the wellspring of community recommendations, best practices, and cool hacks isn’t accessible directly in the product to other community members. Wouldn’t it be cool if, for example, the Dockerfile optimization someone in your company a continent away just figured out was automatically made visible and available to everyone in your company working with a similar image? We think so, too! We see so much potential in enabling community members to help and learn from each other, and we can’t wait to share more with you.

Fair Skies Ahead

In these last two years since our refocusing on developers, we’re humbled by the non-stop growth in the Docker community, the enthusiastic feedback and adoption of the new features we’ve shipped, and the positive support for the business changes we’ve made to enable us to sustainably scale Docker to tens of millions more developers. And with the accelerating demand for new apps and more developers to build, share, and run them, we’re incredibly excited about the next chapters in our journey together with you!

Thank you, and let’s keep shipping!

sj

PS – We can’t wait to share details of the above and more with you at next year’s DockerCon on Tuesday, May 10, 2022. Save the date, it’s gonna be a blast! Register today at https://www.docker.com/dockercon/

The Magic of Docker Desktop

In particular, to enable developers to spend more time building apps, less time on infrastructure, we’re investing heavily to ensure Docker Desktop continues to magically remove the complexities of installing, securing, and maintaining Docker Engine, Kubernetes, Compose, BuildKit, and other modern app development tools for Mac and Windows desktops. This includes installing and maintaining a Linux VM in the native hypervisors, automatically configuring networking between the VM, the local host, and remote hosts, and transparently bind mounting files into local containers. Our own Ben Gotch dug into the details of the magic in a recent blog post.

Community Support for Docker Subscription Updates

Our focus on this mission – investing in developers and reducing complexity – was the driver of the Docker subscription updates we announced on Aug 31, 2021. The overwhelming, positive support from our community, both individual developers and businesses, who recognize the value Docker provides has been humbling and encouraging. These community members see the updated terms for what they are – a means for us to sustainably scale our business and continue delivering delightful Docker experiences to all developers. To share just a few examples:

While the above are just a few of the community members who expressed their support, we are thankful to everyone who has responded and supported us, each in their own way.

Accelerating New Features in Docker Desktop

In fact, the support has been so overwhelmingly positive that we’re able to accelerate our investment and delivery of several highly-requested Docker Desktop features in our public roadmap:

• Docker Desktop for Linux (“DD4L”). DD4L is the second-most popular feature request in our public roadmap, as organizations aspire to provide a consistent, productive, and secure development environment across their Mac, Windows, and Linux desktops. Docker Desktop for Linux will be available to all developers through the free Docker Personal and paid Docker Pro, Team, and Business subscriptions. If you’re interested in early access please sign-up for our developer preview program.
• Docker Desktop Volume Management. Released in June 2021, Docker Desktop Volume Management is proving popular with our Docker Pro and Docker Team users. Developers love the GUI-based visibility and tools for local container volumes, as it helps them avoid local storage surprises and simplifies container volume management. With the overwhelming support we’re receiving, we’re able to make Docker Desktop Volume Management available to all developers in Docker Personal.
• Docker Compose v2.0 GA. Completely re-written from Python to Go and installed, configured, and maintained with Docker Desktop, Docker Compose v2.0 answers several needs of developers, including integrations with AWS and Azure, support for Apple M1 silicon, and support for desktop GPUs. Beta released in June 2021, GA release at the end of October.

It’s been a very encouraging couple of weeks after our subscription updates announced Aug 31, 2021. We are grateful to the Docker community for its support, which is allowing us to invest faster and further in Docker Desktop features for all developers. As we do so, we want to ensure we continue focusing on what’s important to YOU, so please participate in our public roadmap discussions early and often.

Let’s go build, ship, and run!