Docker: The Next Chapter, Again

Only 7 months ago I posted the below in celebration of Docker’s Series C investment from Bill Coughran at Sequoia Capital. Today the company is announcing an unprecedented $95m Series D from Insight Venture Partners as well as Coatue, Goldman Sachs and Northern Trust.

I thought I would take a second to share some updated metrics and success stories from the front lines of the containerization revolution:

• With over 20,000 stars (just short of 2x the next project), Docker remains the #1 starred project on GitHub in the DevOps showcase, and is encroaching on all-time rockstars like Rails and Angular.
• The contributor community has grown another 50% to nearly 900 active on the Docker project!
• Docker itself now employs over 110 people around the world, more than double where it was only 7 months ago.
• Docker has official partnerships with all three major cloud IaaS providers, Google, Amazon and Microsoft, as well as VMware, IBM SoftLayer and Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Docker is, officially now, the future.

Originally posted September 16, 2014

What a ride. In 18 months, Docker has become the center of a whole new wave in application development; Docker containers have become the de facto building block for the next generation of distributed applications. Then last month, at VMworld, the company announced a groundbreaking partnership between the leader in virtualization and the leader in containerization. Between the two we are revolutionizing the software-defined datacenter, and ushering in a new era of application portability between infrastructure and architectures in the public and private cloud.

And now, with today’s Series C investment, we are thrilled to welcome Bill Coughran and Sequoia Capital into the fold. Given all that’s changed I thought it would be interesting to share some of the stats behind the company and take a peek at what happens next for Docker.

Community Stats

• Docker is the #1 starred project on GitHub in the DevOps showcase, and one of the very top non-language projects overall.
• There are nearly 600 active contributors to the Docker project; that passionate community of contributors has tripled since the beginning of the year!
• There are Docker meetups in 110 cities in 43 countries. Last month there were 12 meetups in a single day, touching over 500 developers.

DockerCon

• DockerCon attracted over 500 attendees (with several hundred more vying for a spot on the wait list).
• Over 150 talks were submitted, with 30 delivered from the likes of Gilt, Groupon, eBay and more.
• We heard spectacular keynotes from IBM, RedHat, Google and Rackspace.
• Docker announced Docker 1.0 and Docker Hub.

Finally, Docker Hub has been a great addition to Docker’s value for its ever-expanding community and has become a powerful focal point for the Docker ecosystem. This is the piece of the puzzle that takes Docker from “killer containerization technology” to, simply put, the definitive open platform to build, ship and run distributed applications. Docker Hub serves as a nexus for the community, as well as providing a management layer for these core elements of an application, bringing it to the forefront of our strategy. Whether it’s a dev looking for official versions of the components and packages her application requires, or a QA engineer building an improved testing workflow, or a devops engineer trying to improve scalability — DockerHub will be central to their process, as well as a place to gather and learn from the user community.

That’s probably plenty to preview for now. We still don’t know exactly how this story will end, but we’re thrilled to be partners in writing this amazing saga and empowering the developer community to control their own destiny.