Docker, Inc. Celebrates 10th Anniversary With Alliances
Docker, Inc. celebrated the 10th anniversary of the namesake artifact used widely for building cloud-native applications by announcing alliances with Ambassador Labs to improve the developer experience and Hugging Face to make it simpler to launch and deploy machine learning applications on a cloud service using DockerFile.
In addition, Docker, Inc. also moved to improve the security of container environments by making available Docker Scout, a tool that provides visibility into vulnerabilities in Docker images and surfaces recommendations to remediate them.
During a virtual celebration of the anniversary, Docker, Inc. CEO Scott Johnston says that the line between developer environments on local desktops and the cloud is starting to become indistinct in the hybrid cloud era. The alliance with Ambassador Labs, for example, will integrate Telepresence, a framework for accessing remote Kubernetes services, with the Docker Desktop application development environment running on a local machine.
The goal is to make it simpler for teams of developers to collaboratively work together while accessing Kubernetes clusters in the cloud, he said. Telepresence is an open source project originally developed by Ambassador Labs that is now a sandbox-level project being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Ambassador Labs today includes Telepresence within a framework that enables developers to build and test Kubernetes applications.
Similarly, the alliance with Hugging Face makes it simple to access open source software used to build artificial intelligence (AI) applications running in Spaces on a cloud service with just a few clicks.
Docker Scout, meanwhile, makes it more feasible to shift responsibility for application security left toward developers using either Docker Desktop or the Docker command line interface (CLI) to build container applications. Docker Scout has also been integrated with platforms such as JFrog Artifactory and JFrog Container Registry to make it possible to automatically scan Docker images for vulnerabilities.
In general, Docker, Inc. remains committed to improving the developer experience regardless of how Docker containers are employed, says Johnston. For example, the company recently committed to enabling developers to build applications using WebAssembly (Wasm) software artifacts alongside Docker containers. Originally developed under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for building browser applications, Wasm is emerging as a portable binary instruction format for building software that describes a memory-safe, sandboxed execution environment. Unlike containers that are limited to running on either Linux or Windows, Wasm promises to make it possible for developers to write code once and deploy it anywhere using more than 40 different programming languages.
In effect, the company is moving to ensure Docker Desktop remains relevant regardless of what type of artifact is used to build the more than 750 million applications projected to be built between now and 2025, notes Johnston. Docker, Inc. claims there are now more than 13 million developers building applications using containers and that it has more than 70,000 commercial customers.
It may not be clear just yet how exactly all those millions of applications will be built and deployed, but the company is making it clear it expects Docker Desktop will be in the mix.
