How popular is Docker, the open-source technology and company most closely associated with the red-hot containerized-software movement?
Put it this way: the 500 people wait-listed for DockerCon 2016, a conference in Seattle this coming Sunday through Tuesday, are a bigger group than the entire audience for the first DockerCon, held in June 2014 in San Francisco.
“More than 4,000 people registered this year,” said David Messina, Docker’s senior vice president of marketing. “One hundred companies are sponsors, compared with maybe 30 in 2014. It’s hard to find a technology in the enterprise that’s been adopted so rapidly.”
Containers, which use less CPU and memory than the virtual machines they sometimes replace, have been around since at least 2000, with roots in the FreeBSD operating system. They’ve won praise for getting more applications running on the same server and for simplifying the packaging and migration of those apps.
But even before Docker 1.0 debuted in June 2014, Docker was becoming the center of the rapidly expanding containerized-software solar system. Some 450 companies now offer products meant to complement or augment Docker, Messina said. Docker Hub, a repository of freely reusable code chunks such as pieces of a user interface or a database back-end, has been accessed four billion times, he said. That number stood at less than 10 million two years ago.
Scores of speakers are scheduled to present at the conference, including Docker founder and CTO Solomon Hykes, Harvard computer science professor David Malan, and Daniel Willis, a 13-year-old student who learned to program using Docker’s R software environment for statistical computing. The two-hour general sessions on Monday and Tuesday mornings will be live-streamed.
As it matures, Docker and the containerization movement are facing challenges, some of which may be addressed during the conference, said Jay Lyman, an analyst with 451Research. There’s the tension of being open-source on one hand and being deeply involved in partnerships with major players like Microsoft and IBM on the other. Related to that is the need to choose partners among both big and startups — but “you can’t partner with everyone,” Lyman said.
Focus is shifting from container creation toward container management — a stronger emphasis on concerns of the IT staff who have to manage applications rather than the developers who create them, he said.
And there’s a growing realization, Lyman said, that even though containers are billed as next-generation virtualization, the reality is that the widespread corporate dependence on virtual machines won’t go away quickly. “Enterprises don’t get all the benefits of containers when dealing with VMs, but they get some of the benefits, plus the security of their tried-and-true VM security,” he said. “They will co-exist for some time.”
Among the product announcements associated with DockerCon 2016:
- Skytap Inc., of Seattle, released a driver for Docker Machine that it said extends that product’s native functionality to Skytap’s Cloud. The driver lets organizations remotely provision Docker hosts using a VM Skytap template into the Skytap environment, manage those hosts and control the VM machine state in the hosts, Skytap said. The Skytap Driver for Docker Machine is generally available and is free to Skytap customers via the Apache License, version 2.0. It can be downloaded here.
- Portworx, of Redwood City, Calif., announced PX-Enterprise, which it said makes containers more usable in a production environment by providing data persistence and management. It lets organizations quickly provision storage for containerized apps and schedule it to respond automatically to container bursts. It’s set for general availability late next month, costing less than $2,000 per server.
- CoreOS’s open-source Linux operating system of the same name is now available at no charge in China, where Azure is the first cloud service to support it, CoreOS said. The CoreOS operating system allows packaging an application’s code and all dependencies inside a single container that can run on one or many CoreOS-based machines, the San Francisco-based company said. CoreOS can be set to be automatically updated over the internet. Paid support is available.
- Docker security firm Twistlock said New York-based InVision, which helps companies design and usability-test software, is now using Twistlock’s offering.
Follow GeekWire for coverage of DockerCon 2016 in Seattle next week.
