Docker’s Next Chapter: Advancing Developer Workflows for Modern Apps
Today we start the next chapter in the Docker story, one that’s focused on developers. That we have the opportunity to write this next chapter is thanks to you, our community, for without you we wouldn’t be here. And while our focus on developers builds on recent history, it’s a focus also grounded in Docker’s beginning.
When Solomon Hykes, Docker’s founder, unveiled the Docker project in 2013, he succinctly stated the problem Docker aimed to solve as, “for a developer, shipping code to the server is hard.” To address, Docker abstracted out OS kernels’ complex container primitives, provided a developer-friendly, CLI-based workflow and defined an immutable, portable image format. The result transformed how developers work, making it much easier to build, ship and run their apps on any server. So while container primitives had existed for decades, Docker democratized them and made them as easy to use as
The rest is history. Over the last six years, Docker containerization catalyzed the growth of microservices-based applications, enabled development teams to ship apps many times faster and accelerated the migration of apps from the data center to the cloud. Far from a Docker-only effort, a vibrant community ecosystem of open source and commercial technologies arose which streamlined adoption. Not the least of these is Kubernetes, orchestration technology originating from Google, which enabled highly reliable container deployments at new levels of scale. Also during this time, Docker containers expanded from their Linux x86 beginnings to run on other OSes and architectures, including Microsoft Windows and Arm. To guide the community’s efforts, new governance organizations appeared including CNCF, OCI, and CNAB. As this market grew, our developer community rapidly embraced Docker Desktop and Docker Hub, growing to millions of active users who shared millions of containerized apps and pulled billions of app images.
All this and more in only six years – and the best is yet to come.
Going forward, Docker’s focus is to build on these foundations to advance developer workflows for modern apps. Along with real benefits, the last six years also resulted in additional complexities, an explosion of choices and new potential threats of lock-in. In light of these challenges, Docker and our community ecosystem have the opportunity to extend the open standards, functionality, automation tooling and cloud services of Docker Desktop and Docker Hub to better help developers build, share and run modern apps.
