Docker Inc. Dev Tools Boast 15 Million+ Users
Docker Inc. revealed today that two years after selling its enterprise business to Mirantis to focus its efforts on developers, there are now more than 15 million active users of its tools and services.
Scott Johnston, Docker Inc. CEO, says much of the adoption of those tools and services within organizations are driven from the bottom up by developers that are, for example, using the personal subscription tier that Docker, Inc. made available last year.
Overall, Docker, Inc. is now reporting annual recurring revenue (ARR) of over $50 million, representing 4x growth year-over-year. That financial stability in 2021 enabled Docker, Inc. to accelerate a number of initiatives listed on its product roadmap, including Docker Desktop for Linux, filesystem performance improvements and a pause/resume capability in its tools.
There are also more than 1,200 open source and commercial publishers using Docker Official Images, Docker Verified Publisher images and Docker-sponsored open source projects. Much of the growth can be attributed to digital business transformation initiatives that increased the number of application development projects organizations launched in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, notes Johnston.
Software supply chain concerns are expected to drive greater adoption of containers in 2022, adds Johnston. Flaws in microservices-based applications constructed using containers are easier to remediate because developers can rip and replace containers that have vulnerabilities as compared to patching a monolithic application. In fact, Docker, Inc. research suggests developers can remediate applications based on containers 62% faster, says Johnston.
Docker, Inc. is also committed to making it easier for developers to discover vulnerabilities such as Log4jShell, adds Johnston, via scans. Ultimately, the goal is to make it simpler to safely build applications without having to slow down the pace at which they are being built, he adds.
In the longer term, Johnston says Docker is committed to supporting other types of software artifacts that may gain adoption such as Web Assembly (Wasm). In fact, he noted there is already an effort to create containers that comply with the Open Container Initiative (OCI) specification that can be used within a Wasm application environment.
Johnston also says developers should expect to see Docker, Inc. employ machine learning algorithms and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) to make developers more productive. In fact, improving the developer experience in the name of advancing productivity is why more organizations are standardizing on Docker, Inc. tools, he says.
It’s not clear to what degree container adoption is now being pushed by developers versus internal IT teams standardizing on Kubernetes clusters. In many cases, enterprise IT organizations are now requiring developers to build applications using containers that can be deployed on Kubernetes clusters and can easily scale up and down.
It may have taken longer than many initially anticipated, but it is apparent that containers are now widely used across enterprise IT organizations. The challenge ahead will be managing all the dependencies that will exist between microservices constructed using those containers.
