Docker Trends
Docker has been growing and shaking up the software world with it’s easy-to-use containerization software. Docker has made it incredibly simple to create reusable images that contain files, runtime, and configuration for its users. In this post we’re going to see how much Docker has grown since its original release in 2013.
What is Docker?
Docker is a containerization technology that allows you to bundle configuration, files, and environment setup into what we call a Docker Image.
If you think of an application, it requires a few things in order for it to run. It’s files simply aren’t enough. For example, a PHP or Ruby application needs the PHP or Ruby interpreter to run the application. At the same time, you need PHP or Ruby files to even have an application in the first place!
Git History
Docker is built in the open on Github by a huge community of people. This is awesome because we can take a look into its git history and figure out just how much has been built in its short 3.5 years.
As of right now the core Docker project has over 27,000 commits on its master branch. That’s impressive considering projects such as Ruby on Rails have been around for much longer than Docker (12 years vs 3.5 years) which has over 59,000 commits to master. WordPress (mirrored from svn) has 35,000+, and NodeJS has 14,000+.
Docker’s main repository has on average 20.2 commits per day. Rails has about 13.6 and NodeJS around 5.34. Granted, these numbers aren’t necessarily meaningful. It is possible that the other projects just commit more chunks of code in a single commit, but it is interesting none the less to see more activity overall because Docker has separated a lot of its project into completely separate repositories. Over 80 as of writing (including some very small temporary ones it seems).
Google Search Trends
Looking at Google Trends for Docker definitely shows us that Docker interest is up and to the right.
Not surprisingly, 2 of the top 5 cities searching for “Docker” are San Jose and San Francisco. You can take a look at these trends for yourself here: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=docker. The 2 arrows pointing down in the graph are in the holidays season.
Job Trends
Indeed.com has an awesome tool to see job trends, and looking at job postings mentioning “docker” shows a graph similar to Google’s trend line. Up and to the right.
You can see this graph for yourself here: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-docker.html
As of writing, there are over 5,800 job postings mentioning Docker on indeed.com with ~1,000 estimated to pay $130,000+
Learn It
Docker has a lot of people curious and it’s adoption is growing quickly with projects such as Kubernetes becoming large projects on their own. It has certainly been proven to add value to the development of software and running our software as well. It’s definitely worth taking a look at it. Docker has extensive documentation on it’s website, but we’ve created a course to get started as well!
Take a look at A Practical Guide for Docker on blindside.io and learn what its all about.
Robert Ross (or Bobby Tables if you prefer) is the creator of Blindside.io and engineer at past companies like DigitalOcean and Thunderbolt Labs. He currently works at Namely running the Core Services and Integrations team.
