As you might have seen, Stack Overflow recently unveiled the 2024 Developer Survey results. This always serves for me as a time to reflect on what Docker has accomplished each year in between. Since our inclusion in the survey five years ago, the Stack Overflow community has consistently ranked Docker highly. We were humbled to see Docker recognized as the most-used and most-desired developer tool for the second consecutive year. In addition, this year the community has elevated Docker to be the most-admired (78%). Moreover, Docker is the most-used tool (in the “other tools” category) by professional developers, with 59% using it in their work. This is the direct result of the value developers get by using Docker: a great developer experience, a step-function improvement in productivity, the industry’s largest repository of trusted content, and a community to support getting things done. 

Your votes and support mean the world to us, and we couldn’t have achieved this without the Docker and Stack Overflow developer communities! Your feedback and enthusiasm drive us to keep improving and innovating.

When Stack Overflow released the results of last year’s 2023 Developer Survey and we learned that Stack Overflow’s community ranked Docker as the #1 most-desired and #1 most-used developer tool, I said that it means we can’t slow down and need to go even faster in our effort to serve developers. Since the 2023 survey, we have continued listening to your needs and have delivered many improvements in speed, security, collaboration, content, and functionality.  

The 2024 survey results highlight a few key themes that resonate deeply with Docker’s mission and feedback we’re hearing directly from our community: Developers want tools that enhance productivity, simplify workflows, and help them with the latest technological advancements — and yes, that includes AI. 

Let’s look at a few key innovations and updates from the past year that reflect how we’re addressing your feedback and the evolving landscape. 

What’s new

We released Docker Scout for actionable insights in the software supply chain, helping developers address security and policy issues at the time of writing code rather than wait for CI results or, much worse, discover issues when an app is in production. We also provide a free Docker Scout Team subscription to all Docker-Sponsored Open Source (DSOS) participants to help ensure more of the content on Docker Hub is secure from the start. Then, we added Docker Scout Health Scores for security grading containers in your Docker Hub repos. We announced Docker Build Cloud to speed up build times. We also welcomed AtomicJar, maker of Testcontainers, to the Docker family.

Docker continues to innovate in bringing the power of the cloud to local development. Specifically, through Docker Desktop developers easily benefit from Docker’s cloud services in their inner loops, including Docker Build Cloud, Docker Scout, Testcontainers Cloud, and Docker Hub. The result? More frequent releases of higher quality, more secure applications. 

Speaking of Docker Desktop, we’ve delivered more than a dozen Docker Desktop releases in the past year, each one providing more capabilities to boost developer productivity, including Docker Debug, Docker Build checks, Docker Init, Builds view, private marketplace for Docker Extensions, Compose Watch, Resource Saver mode, and much more.

And we’ve also shipped Betas of many new capabilities, including GitHub Actions builds, Compose File Viewer, a new terminal feature in Docker Desktop, enterprise-grade Volume Backup to cloud providers, Docker Desktop for Windows on Arm, Docker Desktop support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and others.

While rapidly rolling out new features and products, we remain focused on security. In addition to unveiling Docker Scout, our tool designed to enhance the security of the software supply chain, we were happy to announce that we have received our SOC 2 Type 2 attestation and ISO 27001 certification with no exceptions or major non-conformities. 

This past year has been a busy one for open source, and Docker remains committed to actively maintaining projects that are core to the container ecosystem, including Compose, BuildKit, runc, containerd, Moby (Docker Engine), Distribution, and more. As but one example, BuildKit now includes experimental support for Windows containers, expanding its versatility and reach. By investing in these open source projects, Docker and our community together ensure the container ecosystem continues to evolve to better serve developers.

AI/ML advancements 

We know from our community and customers that Docker is already a pivotal part of the AI/ML development ecosystem, and its use in AI/ML is only growing. For example, a year ago there were more than 100 million pulls of AI/ML images in Docker Hub. Since then that number has grown to more than 500 million!

In the past year we’ve also leaned into leveraging AI to help developers innovate faster and smarter. For example, our integration with tools like GitHub Copilot supports rapid onboarding and continuous learning for developers. Additionally, we’ve added an AI-powered assistant to Docker documentation. By leveraging AI-driven assistance, developers can enhance their coding skills, stay updated with the latest trends, and contribute more effectively to their organizations. 

Looking further out, we see AI/ML fundamentally changing how developers work and how applications are built. To explore these quickly evolving spaces together with our community, we are experimenting in public with new techniques and tools in our Docker Labs GenAI series. For example, a recent post explores how to create Dockerfiles with GenAI. 

Stay tuned — we have even more AI ideas percolating!

Guides and manuals

Speaking of documentation, our Docs and DevRel teams, with help from our Docker Captains, have been up-leveling our guides and manuals. Whether you’re brand new to the Docker community or have been with us from the beginning, you’ll find guides that can take you from starting with Docker foundational concepts to language-specific, use-case, and deep-dive tutorials. Do you have ideas to contribute? We want to hear from you!  

Thank you, and stay in touch

Stack Overflow’s 2024 Developer Survey highlights the critical role Docker plays in the developer ecosystem. By continually innovating and addressing the needs of our community and customers, we help developers and businesses achieve their goals. As we look to the future, Docker remains dedicated to empowering every developer and team with the best solutions to navigate and thrive in the ever-evolving software development landscape.

On behalf of everyone here at Team Docker: Thank you for your ongoing support and trust in Docker!

Learn more

• Subscribe to Docker Navigator to stay updated with what’s happening at Docker.
• Read our 2024 State of Application Development Report to see insights from our own survey, which digs into key trends such as the expanding roles of cloud and AI/ML in software development and attitudes toward the shift-left approach to security.
• See our case study collection to learn how our customers are using Docker as a foundational tool in their tech stack.
• Get the latest release of Docker Desktop.
• Vote on what’s next! Check out our public roadmap.
• Have questions? The Docker community is here to help.

It is not often you can reflect back and pinpoint a moment where an entire industry changed, less often to pinpoint that moment and know you were there to see it first hand.

On June 10th, 2014, day 2 of the first ever DockerCon, 16:04 seconds into his keynote speech, Google VP of Infrastructure Eric Brewer announced that Google was releasing the open source solution they built for orchestrating containers: Kubernetes. This was one of those moments. The announcement of Kubernetes began a tectonic shift in how the internet runs at scale, so many of the most important applications in the world today would not be possible without Docker and Kubernetes.

You can watch the announcement on YouTube.

We didn’t know how much Kubernetes would change things at that time. In fact, in those two days, Apache Mesos, Red Hat’s GearD, Docker Libswarm, and Facebook’s Tupperware were all also launched. This triggered what later became known by some as “the Container Orchestration War.” Fast forward three years and the community had consolidated on Kubernetes for the orchestration layer and Docker (powered by containerd) for the container format, distribution protocol, and runtime. In 2017,  Docker integrated Kubernetes in its desktop and server products, and this helped cement Kubernetes leadership.

Why was it so impactful? Kubernetes landed at just the right time and solved just the right problems. The number of containers and server nodes in production was increasing exponentially every day. The role of DevOps put a lot of burden on the engineer. They needed solutions that could help manage applications at unprecedented scale. Containers and their orchestration engines were, and continue to be, the lifeblood of modern application deployments because they are the only real way to solve this need.

We, the Docker team and community, consider ourselves incredibly fortunate to have played a role in this history. To look back and say we had a part in what has been built from that one moment is humbling.

… and the potential of what is yet to come is beyond exciting! Especially knowing that our impact continues today as a keystone to modern application development. Docker enables app development teams to rapidly deliver applications, secure their software supply chains, and do so without compromising the visibility and controls required by the business.

Happy 10th birthday Kubernetes! Congratulations to all who were and continue to be involved in creating this tremendous gift to the software industry.

Learn more

• Join the conversation on LinkedIn.
• Build Kubernetes-ready applications on your desktop with Docker.
• Get the latest Docker news.

Eleven years ago, Solomon Hykes walked onto the stage at PyCon 2013 and revealed Docker to the world for the first time. The problem Docker was looking to solve? “Shipping code to the server is hard.”

And the world of application software development changed forever.

Docker was built on the shoulders of giants of the Linux kernel, copy-on-write file systems, and developer-friendly git semantics. The result? Docker has fundamentally transformed how developers build, share, and run applications. By “dockerizing” an app and its dependencies into a standardized, open format, Docker dramatically lowered the friction between devs and ops, enabling devs to focus on their apps — what’s inside the container — and ops to focus on deploying any app, anywhere — what’s outside the container, in a standardized format. Furthermore, this standardized “unit of work” that abstracts the app from the underlying infrastructure enables an “inner loop” for developers of code, build, test, verify, and debug, which results in 13X more frequent releases of higher-quality, more secure updates.

The subsequent energy over the past 11 years from the ecosystem of developers, community, open source maintainers, partners, and customers cannot be understated, and we are so thankful and appreciative of your support. This has shown up in many ways, including the following:

• Ranked #1 “most-wanted” tool/platform by Stack Overflow’s developer community for the past four years
• 26 million monthly active IPs accessing 15 million repos on Docker Hub, pulling them 25 billion times per month
• 17 million registered developers
• Moby project has 67.5k stars, 18.5k forks, and more than 2,200 contributors; Docker Compose has 32.1k stars and 5k forks
• A vibrant network of 70 Docker Captains across 25 countries serving 167 community meetup groups with more than 200k members and 4800 total meetups
• 79,000+ customers

The next decade

In our first decade, we changed how developers build, share, and run any app, anywhere — and we’re only accelerating in our second!

Specifically, you’ll see us double down on meeting development teams where they are to enable them to rapidly ship high-quality, secure apps via the following focus areas:

• Dev Team Productivity. First, we’ll continue to help teams take advantage of the right tech for the right job — whether that’s Linux containers, Windows containers, serverless functions, and/or Wasm (Web Assembly) — with the tools they love and the skills they already possess. Second, by bringing together the best of local and the best of cloud, we’ll enable teams to discover and address issues even faster in the “inner loop,” as you’re already seeing today with our early efforts with Docker Scout, Docker Build Cloud, and Testcontainers Cloud.
• GenAI. This tech is ushering in a “golden age” for development teams, and we’re investing to help in two areas: First, our GenAI Stack — built through collaboration with partners Ollama, LangChain, and Neo4j — enables dev teams to quickly stand up secure, local GenAI-powered apps. Second, our Docker AI is uniquely informed by anonymized data from dev teams using Docker, which enables us to deliver automations that eliminate toil and reduce security risks.
• Software Supply Chain. The software supply chain is heterogeneous, extensive, and complex for dev teams to navigate and secure, and Docker will continue to help simplify, make more visible, and manage it end-to-end. Whether it’s the trusted content “building blocks” of Docker Official Images (DOI) in Docker Hub, the transformation of ingredients into runnable images via BuildKit, verifying and securing the dev environment with digital signatures and enhanced container isolation, consuming metadata feedback from running containers in production, or making the entire end-to-end supply chain visible and issues actionable in Docker Scout, Docker has it covered and helps make a more secure internet!

Dialing it past 11

While our first decade was fantastic, there’s so much more we can do together as a community to serve app development teams, and we couldn’t be more excited as our second decade together gets underway and we dial it past 11! If you haven’t already, won’t you join us today?!

How has Docker influenced your approach to software development? Share your experiences with the community and join the conversation on LinkedIn.

Let’s build, share, and run — together!

We’re shifting testing “left” to help developers ship quality apps faster

I’m thrilled to announce that Docker is whale-coming AtomicJar, the makers of Testcontainers, to the Docker family. With its support for Java, .NET, Go, Node.js, and six other programming languages, together with its container-based testing automation, Testcontainers has become the de facto standard test framework for the developer’s ”inner loop.” Why? The results speak for themselves — Testcontainers enables step-function improvements in both the quality and speed of application delivery.

This addition continues Docker’s focus on improving the developer experience to maximize the time developers spend building innovative apps. Docker already accelerates the “inner loop” app development steps — build, verify (through Docker Scout), run, debug, and share — and now, with AtomicJar and Testcontainers, we’re adding “test.” As a result, developers using Docker will be able to deliver quality applications with less effort, even faster than before.

Testcontainers itself is a great open source success story in the developer tools ecosystem. Last year, Testcontainers saw a 100% increase in Docker Hub pulls, from 50 million to 100 million, making it one of the fastest-growing Docker Hub projects. Furthermore, Testcontainers has transformed testing at organizations like DoorDash, Netflix, Spotify, and Uber and thousands more.

One of the more exciting things about whale-coming AtomicJar is the bringing together our open source communities. Specifically, the Testcontainers community has deep roots in the programming language communities above. We look forward to continuing to support the Testcontainers open source project and look forward to what our teams do to expand it further.

Please join me in whale-coming AtomicJar and Testcontainers to Docker!

sj

FAQ | Docker Acquisition of AtomicJar

With Docker’s acquisition of AtomicJar and associated Testcontainers projects, you’re sure to have questions. We’ve answered the most common ones in this FAQ.

As with all of our open source efforts, Docker strives to do right by the community. We want this acquisition to benefit everyone — community and customer — in keeping with our developer obsession.

What will happen to Testcontainers Cloud customers?
Customers of AtomicJar’s paid offering, Testcontainers Cloud, will continue while we work to develop new and better integration options. Existing Testcontainers Cloud subscribers will see an update to the supplier on their invoices, but no other billing changes will occur.

Will Testcontainers become closed-source?
There are no plans to change the licensing structure of Testcontainers’s open source components. Docker has always valued the contributions of open source communities.

Will Testcontainers or its companion projects be discontinued?
There are no plans to discontinue any Testcontainers projects.

Will people still be able to contribute to Testcontainers’s open source projects?
Yes! Testcontainers has always benefited from outside collaboration in the form of feedback, discussion, and code contributions, and there’s no desire to change that relationship. For more information about how to participate in Testcontainers’s development, see the contributing guidelines for Java, Go, and .NET.

What about other downstream users, companies, and projects using Testcontainers?
Testcontainers’ open source licenses will continue to allow the embedding and use of Testcontainers by other projects, products, and tooling.

Who will provide support for Testcontainers projects and products?
In the short term, support for Testcontainers’s projects and products will continue to be provided through the existing support channels. We will work to merge support into Docker’s channels in the near future.

How can I get started with Testcontainers?
To get started with Testcontainers follow this guide or one of the guides for a language of your choice:

• Getting started with Testcontainers for .NET
• Getting started with Testcontainers for Go
• Getting started with Testcontainers for Java
• Getting started with Testcontainers for Node.js

For the last three years, DockerCon, our annual global developer event, was 100% virtual. Still, we were humbled by the interest and response — tens of thousands of developer participants from around the world each year. Wow! (If you missed any of ’em, they’re available on YouTube: 2020, 2021, 2022!)

With our collective global return to the “new normal,” DockerCon 2023 will be hybrid — both live (in Los Angeles, California) and virtual. Our desire is to once again experience the live magic of the hallway track, the serendipitous developer-to-developer sharing of tips and tricks, and the celebration of our community’s accomplishments … all while looking forward together toward a really exciting future. And for members of our community who can’t attend in person, we hope you’ll join us virtually!

In the spirit of keeping this post brief, I’ll share a few community highlights here, but expect much more news and updates next week at DockerCon! 

Our open source projects — containerd, Compose, BuildKit, moby/moby, and others — continue to scale in terms of contributions, contributors, and stars. Thank you! 

And overall, our developer community is now at 20M monthly active IPs, 16M registered developers, 15M Docker Hub repos, and 16B image pulls per month from Docker Hub. Again, we’re humbled by this continued growth, engagement, and enthusiasm of our developer community.

And in terms of looking forward to what’s next … well, you gotta tune-in to DockerCon to find out! 😀 But, seriously, there’s never been a better time to be a developer. To wit, with the digitization of All The Things, there’s a need for more than 750 million apps in the next couple of years. That means there’s a need for more developers and more creativity and innovation. And at DockerCon you’ll hear how our community plans to help developers capitalize on this opportunity.

Specifically, and without revealing too much here: We see a chance to bring the power of the cloud to accelerate the developer’s “inner loop,” before the git commit and CI. Furthermore, we see an untapped opportunity to apply GenAI to optimize the non-code gen aspects of the application. By some accounts, this encompasses 85% or more of the overall app.

Piqued your interest? Hope so! 😀 Looking forward to seeing you at DockerCon!

sj

Learn more

• Register for DockerCon.
• Register for DockerCon workshops.
• Watch past DockerCon videos: 2020, 2021, 2022.
• Get the latest release of Docker Desktop.
• Vote on what’s next! Check out our public roadmap.
• Have questions? The Docker community is here to help.
• New to Docker? Get started.

Stack Overflow’s annual 2023 Developer Survey engaged more than 90,000 developers to learn about their work, the technologies they use, their likes and dislikes, and much, much more. As a company obsessed with serving developers, we’re honored that Stack Overflow’s community ranked Docker the #1 most-desired and #1 most-used developer tool. Since our inclusion in the survey four years ago, the Stack Overflow community has consistently ranked Docker highly, and we deeply appreciate this ongoing recognition and support.

Giving developers speed, security, and choice

While we’re pleased with this recognition, for us it means we cannot slow down: We need to go even faster in our effort to serve developers. In what ways? Well, our developer community tells us they value speed, security, and choice:

• Speed: Developers want to maximize their time writing code for their app — and minimize set-up and overhead — so they can ship early and often.
• Security: Specifically, non-intrusive, informative, and actionable security. Developers want to catch and fix vulnerabilities right now when coding in their “inner loop,” not 30 minutes later in CI or seven days later in production.
• Choice: Developers want the freedom to explore new technologies and select the right tool for the right job and not be constrained to use lowest-common-denominator technologies in “everything-but-the-kitchen-sink” monolithic tools.

And indeed, these are the “North Stars” that inform our roadmap and prioritize our product development efforts. Recent examples include:

Speed

• Docker Init: Automatically generates Dockerfiles and docker-compose.yml files for Python, Node, and Go apps.
• VirtioFS support: 98% reduction in database import time.
• Docker Compose file watch: Automatically detects and syncs local host code changes with the container.
• vpnkit => gVisor: 5X faster container-to-host networking performance.

Security

• Docker Scout: Automatically detects vulnerabilities and recommends fixes while devs are coding in their “inner loop.”
• Attestations: Docker Build automatically generates SBOMs and SLSA Provenance and attaches them to the image.

Choice

• Docker Extensions: Launched just over a year ago, and since then, partners and community members have created and published to Docker Hub more than 700 Docker Extensions for a wide range of developer tools covering Kubernetes app development, security, observability, and more.
• Docker-Sponsored Open Source Projects: Available 100% for free on Docker Hub, this sponsorship program supports more than 600 open source community projects.
• Multiple architectures: A single docker build command can produce an image that runs on multiple architectures, including x86, ARM, RISC-V, and even IBM mainframes.

What’s next?

While we’re pleased that our efforts have been well-received by our developer community, we’re not slowing down. So many exciting changes in our industry today present us with new opportunities to serve developers.

For example, the lines between the local developer laptop and the cloud are becoming increasingly blurred. This offers opportunities to combine the power of the cloud with the convenience and low latency of local development. Another example is AI/ML. Specifically, LLMs in feedback loops with users offer opportunities to automate more tasks to further reduce the toil on developers.

Watch these spaces — we’re looking forward to sharing more with you soon.

Thank you!

Docker only exists because of our community of developers, Docker Captains and Community Leaders, customers, and partners, and we’re grateful for your on-going support as reflected in this year’s Stack Overflow survey results. On behalf of everyone here at Team Docker: THANK YOU. And we look forward to continuing to build the future together with you.

Learn more

• Get the latest release of Docker Desktop.
• Vote on what’s next! Check out our public roadmap.
• Have questions? The Docker community is here to help.
• New to Docker? Get started.

Red Hat’s Universal Base Image eliminates “works on my machine” headaches for developers.

It’s Red Hat Summit week, and we wanted to use this as an opportunity to highlight several aspects of Docker’s partnership with Red Hat. In this post, we highlight Docker Hub and Red Hat’s Universal Base Images (UBI). Also check out our new post on simplifying Kubernetes development with Docker Desktop + Red Hat OpenShift.

Docker Hub is the world’s largest public registry of artifacts for developers, providing the fundamental building blocks — web servers, runtimes, databases, and more — for any application. It offers more than 15 million images for containers, serverless functions, and Wasm with support for multiple operating systems (Linux, Windows) and architectures (x86, ARM). Altogether, these 15 million images are pulled more than 16 billion times per month by over 20 million IPs.

While the majority of the 15 million images are community images, a subset are trusted content, both open source and commercial, curated and actively maintained by Docker and upstream open source communities and Docker’s ISV partners.

Docker and Red Hat have been partners since 2013, and Red Hat started distributing Linux images through Docker Hub in 2014. To help developers reduce the “works on my machine” finger-pointing and ensure consistency between development and production environments, in 2019 Red Hat launched Universal Base Image (UBI). Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), UBI provides the same reliability, security, and performance as RHEL. Furthermore, to meet the different use cases of developers and ISVs, UBI comes in four sizes — standard, minimal, multi-service, and micro — and offers channels so that additional packages can be added as needed.

Given Docker’s reach in the developer community and the breadth and depth of developer content on Docker Hub, Docker and Red Hat agreed that distributing Red Hat UBI on Docker Hub made a lot of sense. Thus, in May 2021 Red Hat became a Docker Verified Publisher (DVP) and launched Red Hat UBIs on Docker Hub. As a DVP, Red Hat’s UBIs are easier for developers to discover, and it gives developers an extra level of assurance that the images they’re using are accessible, safe, and maintained.

The results? Tens of 1000s of developers are pulling Red Hat UBI millions of times every month. Furthermore, the pulls of Red Hat Universal Base image have grown 2.6X times in the last 12 months alone. Such growth points to value Docker and Red Hat together bring to the developer community.

… and we’re not finished! Having provided Red Hat UBIs directly to developers, now Docker and Red Hat are working together with Docker’s ISV partners and open source communities to bring the value of UBI to those software stacks as well. Stay tuned for more!

Learn More

• Docker Verified Publisher (DVP)
• Red Hat Universal Base Images (UBIs)
• Docker Official Images (DOI)
• Docker-sponsored Open Source (DSOS)