Docker Inc. Extends Developer Tool Portfolio
At the DockerCon conference today, Docker, Inc. made generally available Docker Scout, an event-based tool that makes it simpler for developers to identify and remediate vulnerabilities in libraries used in container-based applications. It also provides integrations with Sysdig, JFrog Artifactory, Amazon Web Service Elastic Container Registry (AWS ECR), BastionZero, GitHub, GitLab, CircleCI and Jenkins to facilitate DevSecOps workflows.
In addition, the company made available in beta Docker Debug and a revamped version of Docker Build, a tool for creating container images that is now 39 times faster than the previous iteration and also provides an option to offload the build process to a cloud service.
Docker Inc. CEO Scott Johnston said collectively, these tools streamline the “inner-loop” process developers employ to build applications using containers. The overall goal is to increase developer productivity by providing the context needed to reduce vulnerabilities that need to be remediated after an application is deployed and reducing the time needed to build images. Developers today can spend as much as an hour per day per project creating container images.
In a similar vein, Docker Debug reduces the time spent debugging applications. Developers today spend as much as 60% of their time debugging applications. Much of that time is taken by sorting and configuring tools and then setting them up. Docker Debug streamlines that process using a language-independent toolbox for debugging instances of containers running locally and remotely, said Johnston.
That’s critical because it’s becoming increasingly common for developers to work with 20 to 30 containers that might be too large to efficiently run on a laptop, he added. In general, the line between developer environments on local desktops and the cloud is starting to become indistinct in the hybrid cloud era. The challenge is making that shift between those environments as effortless as possible.
Docker Inc. currently has more than 79,000 customers, with 20 million developers actively building applications using its tools every month, said Johnston.
In general, Docker is committed to enabling developers to build applications using Docker containers and WebAssembly (Wasm) software artifacts. 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.
Regardless of how applications are built today and tomorrow, Docker is committed to making sure its expanding portfolio of tools remains relevant. The challenge, as always, is not only to enable developers to build secure applications faster but also to ensure they are deployed in a timely manner by integrating the tools developers prefer with continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms that large number of organizations rely on to deliver those applications from the network edge to the cloud.
