Docker, Inc, the commercial entity developed around the Docker platform, made a couple of announcements today as part of their dockercon14 conference including the release of 1.0 of the project and an official marketplace for “Dockerized” products.
CEO Ben Golub said the announcements at the conference are the culmination of 15 months of frenzied work for the startup. Golub explained 1.0 is the first production quality version with commercial support and documentation. He said a lot of people had been working with 0.x versions of the product up until now, but that this should give more conservative organizations like banks a greater comfort level using it because it has the backing of not just the community, but an official commercial entity.
Docker 1.0 is another product that takes advantage of containerization techniques developed by Google, in this case, providing a safe way to distribute applications without breaking them every time you make a change or move to a different stage of the development cycle.
Traditionally, developers and operations have been at odds because developers wanted to make changes and operations wanted stability. Golub said this was necessary because changes tended to break things in each step of the development process.
“We have taken a huge pain point for developers and given them a solution,” he said. “And we have solved a big pain point for sys admins as well. We have made Dev and Ops happy.”
That’s because, he explained, with Docker 1.0, a developer can push a button and whatever works on a laptop, will work perfectly in production, staging and customer environments. Each change or movement to the next step in the development workflow, doesn’t break the program and force the developer to find whatever issue is causing the problem.
With the guts of the program stored safely inside the Docker container, developers can change the inside and the outside always works consistently.
In addition to Docker 1.0, the company also announced Docker Hub, a hosted service where developers can find or publish “Dockerized” applications. A Dockerized application is one that has been tuned to work with Docker. The hub provides a place where developers can collaborate on these projects and find ones that have been more fully vetted by Docker maintainers, whose job is to filter the contributions and find the best ones for a particular job or platform.
Golub says if you are going to go open source, you have to jump in with both feet and having a community of 450 developer partners has helped the 35 person company (and one turtle) develop all of this technology and host a conference, all in just 15 months of operation.
And he says, they will focus on maintaing the core Docker product and the Docker Hub and let the community act as a vetting mechanism for the rest of the content. As he says, if a contribution isn’t very good, the market will speak.
As for the conference itself, Golub said, they hadn’t considered the enormity of organizing a conference while pulling off a couple of major releases, but when the picked the date, they didn’t realize just how much of a challenge it would be. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he joked.
And if the numbers are any indication, it should be a success. They had originally planned for 500 people. They then allowed a 100 more and as of Friday, they had a waiting list of over 400 people who wanted to attend, Golub told me.
The speakers include industry heavyweights from Google, IBM, Rackspace and Red Hat. In fact, Wired reports that Google is fully committed to Docker and the speech by Googler Eric Brewer on Day Two of the conference should give the project a big boost.
The company’s most recent funding round was $15M Series B. TechCrunch reported the round was lead by Greylock Partners. Minority partners included Insight Venture Partners and existing investors Benchmark Capital and Trinity Ventures. It’s also worth mentioning that Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang has contributed to the project in earlier rounds,