And the world of application software development changed forever.

Docker was built on the shoulders of giants of the Linux kernel, copy-on-write file systems, and developer-friendly git semantics. The result? Docker has fundamentally transformed how developers build, share, and run applications. By “dockerizing” an app and its dependencies into a standardized, open format, Docker dramatically lowered the friction between devs and ops, enabling devs to focus on their apps — what’s inside the container — and ops to focus on deploying any app, anywhere — what’s outside the container, in a standardized format. Furthermore, this standardized “unit of work” that abstracts the app from the underlying infrastructure enables an “inner loop” for developers of code, build, test, verify, and debug, which results in 13X more frequent releases of higher-quality, more secure updates.

The subsequent energy over the past 11 years from the ecosystem of developers, community, open source maintainers, partners, and customers cannot be understated, and we are so thankful and appreciative of your support. This has shown up in many ways, including the following:

• Ranked #1 “most-wanted” tool/platform by Stack Overflow’s developer community for the past four years
• 26 million monthly active IPs accessing 15 million repos on Docker Hub, pulling them 25 billion times per month
• 17 million registered developers
• Moby project has 67.5k stars, 18.5k forks, and more than 2,200 contributors; Docker Compose has 32.1k stars and 5k forks
• A vibrant network of 70 Docker Captains across 25 countries serving 167 community meetup groups with more than 200k members and 4800 total meetups
• 79,000+ customers

The next decade

In our first decade, we changed how developers build, share, and run any app, anywhere — and we’re only accelerating in our second!

Specifically, you’ll see us double down on meeting development teams where they are to enable them to rapidly ship high-quality, secure apps via the following focus areas:

• Dev Team Productivity. First, we’ll continue to help teams take advantage of the right tech for the right job — whether that’s Linux containers, Windows containers, serverless functions, and/or Wasm (Web Assembly) — with the tools they love and the skills they already possess. Second, by bringing together the best of local and the best of cloud, we’ll enable teams to discover and address issues even faster in the “inner loop,” as you’re already seeing today with our early efforts with Docker Scout, Docker Build Cloud, and Testcontainers Cloud.
• GenAI. This tech is ushering in a “golden age” for development teams, and we’re investing to help in two areas: First, our GenAI Stack — built through collaboration with partners Ollama, LangChain, and Neo4j — enables dev teams to quickly stand up secure, local GenAI-powered apps. Second, our Docker AI is uniquely informed by anonymized data from dev teams using Docker, which enables us to deliver automations that eliminate toil and reduce security risks.
• Software Supply Chain. The software supply chain is heterogeneous, extensive, and complex for dev teams to navigate and secure, and Docker will continue to help simplify, make more visible, and manage it end-to-end. Whether it’s the trusted content “building blocks” of Docker Official Images (DOI) in Docker Hub, the transformation of ingredients into runnable images via BuildKit, verifying and securing the dev environment with digital signatures and enhanced container isolation, consuming metadata feedback from running containers in production, or making the entire end-to-end supply chain visible and issues actionable in Docker Scout, Docker has it covered and helps make a more secure internet!

Dialing it past 11

While our first decade was fantastic, there’s so much more we can do together as a community to serve app development teams, and we couldn’t be more excited as our second decade together gets underway and we dial it past 11! If you haven’t already, won’t you join us today?!

How has Docker influenced your approach to software development? Share your experiences with the community and join the conversation on LinkedIn.

Let’s build, share, and run — together!

I’m thrilled to announce that Docker is whale-coming AtomicJar, the makers of Testcontainers, to the Docker family. With its support for Java, .NET, Go, Node.js, and six other programming languages, together with its container-based testing automation, Testcontainers has become the de facto standard test framework for the developer’s ”inner loop.” Why? The results speak for themselves — Testcontainers enables step-function improvements in both the quality and speed of application delivery.

This addition continues Docker’s focus on improving the developer experience to maximize the time developers spend building innovative apps. Docker already accelerates the “inner loop” app development steps — build, verify (through Docker Scout), run, debug, and share — and now, with AtomicJar and Testcontainers, we’re adding “test.” As a result, developers using Docker will be able to deliver quality applications with less effort, even faster than before.

Testcontainers itself is a great open source success story in the developer tools ecosystem. Last year, Testcontainers saw a 100% increase in Docker Hub pulls, from 50 million to 100 million, making it one of the fastest-growing Docker Hub projects. Furthermore, Testcontainers has transformed testing at organizations like DoorDash, Netflix, Spotify, and Uber and thousands more.

One of the more exciting things about whale-coming AtomicJar is the bringing together our open source communities. Specifically, the Testcontainers community has deep roots in the programming language communities above. We look forward to continuing to support the Testcontainers open source project and look forward to what our teams do to expand it further.

Please join me in whale-coming AtomicJar and Testcontainers to Docker!

sj

FAQ | Docker Acquisition of AtomicJar

With Docker’s acquisition of AtomicJar and associated Testcontainers projects, you’re sure to have questions. We’ve answered the most common ones in this FAQ.

As with all of our open source efforts, Docker strives to do right by the community. We want this acquisition to benefit everyone — community and customer — in keeping with our developer obsession.

What will happen to Testcontainers Cloud customers?
Customers of AtomicJar’s paid offering, Testcontainers Cloud, will continue while we work to develop new and better integration options. Existing Testcontainers Cloud subscribers will see an update to the supplier on their invoices, but no other billing changes will occur.

Will Testcontainers become closed-source?
There are no plans to change the licensing structure of Testcontainers’s open source components. Docker has always valued the contributions of open source communities.

Will Testcontainers or its companion projects be discontinued?
There are no plans to discontinue any Testcontainers projects.

Will people still be able to contribute to Testcontainers’s open source projects?
Yes! Testcontainers has always benefited from outside collaboration in the form of feedback, discussion, and code contributions, and there’s no desire to change that relationship. For more information about how to participate in Testcontainers’s development, see the contributing guidelines for Java, Go, and .NET.

What about other downstream users, companies, and projects using Testcontainers?
Testcontainers’ open source licenses will continue to allow the embedding and use of Testcontainers by other projects, products, and tooling.

Who will provide support for Testcontainers projects and products?
In the short term, support for Testcontainers’s projects and products will continue to be provided through the existing support channels. We will work to merge support into Docker’s channels in the near future.

How can I get started with Testcontainers?
To get started with Testcontainers follow this guide or one of the guides for a language of your choice:

• Getting started with Testcontainers for .NET
• Getting started with Testcontainers for Go
• Getting started with Testcontainers for Java
• Getting started with Testcontainers for Node.js

With our collective global return to the “new normal,” DockerCon 2023 will be hybrid — both live (in Los Angeles, California) and virtual. Our desire is to once again experience the live magic of the hallway track, the serendipitous developer-to-developer sharing of tips and tricks, and the celebration of our community’s accomplishments … all while looking forward together toward a really exciting future. And for members of our community who can’t attend in person, we hope you’ll join us virtually!

In the spirit of keeping this post brief, I’ll share a few community highlights here, but expect much more news and updates next week at DockerCon! 

Our open source projects — containerd, Compose, BuildKit, moby/moby, and others — continue to scale in terms of contributions, contributors, and stars. Thank you! 

And overall, our developer community is now at 20M monthly active IPs, 16M registered developers, 15M Docker Hub repos, and 16B image pulls per month from Docker Hub. Again, we’re humbled by this continued growth, engagement, and enthusiasm of our developer community.

And in terms of looking forward to what’s next … well, you gotta tune-in to DockerCon to find out! 😀 But, seriously, there’s never been a better time to be a developer. To wit, with the digitization of All The Things, there’s a need for more than 750 million apps in the next couple of years. That means there’s a need for more developers and more creativity and innovation. And at DockerCon you’ll hear how our community plans to help developers capitalize on this opportunity.

Specifically, and without revealing too much here: We see a chance to bring the power of the cloud to accelerate the developer’s “inner loop,” before the git commit and CI. Furthermore, we see an untapped opportunity to apply GenAI to optimize the non-code gen aspects of the application. By some accounts, this encompasses 85% or more of the overall app.

Piqued your interest? Hope so! 😀 Looking forward to seeing you at DockerCon!

sj

Learn more

• Register for DockerCon.
• Register for DockerCon workshops.
• Watch past DockerCon videos: 2020, 2021, 2022.
• 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.

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)

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/