Another successful year at DockerCon for Docker and the enterprise. Docker is making large investments to make the platform easier to setup, more secure, and simpler to manage. A lot of the benefits for the enterprise are rooted in the open source project. Day 1 saw many announcements on the open source side that eluded to many exciting announcements for the enterprise on Day 2. Here are the highlights:

  • Open Container Initiative — Docker released the first OCI compatible Docker Engine with ContainerD and RunC. Highlights Docker’s investment in the community and standards along with the ability to update the engine without stopping the containers.

  • Docker Swarm Upgrades — Docker released a new version of Docker Swarm that has removed the dependency of an external key value store (Consul, ETCD, Zookeeper), a PKI infrastructure with key rotation, and much easier installation. SwarmKit — Docker integrated SwarmKit, a services management infrastructure that rebalances load, enforces container counts, and has rolling update support baked right into the API.

  • Docker for AWS and Azure — Similar to Docker for Mac and Windows Docker has announced “native” integration with the cloud providers. This is in private beta but will integrate directly with each platform register instances and services with load balancers and I imagine some sort of network level integration. This also lays the ground work for autoscaling functionality at the Docker Engine or Swarm level.

  • Docker Universal Control Plane Updates — Universal Control Plane saw the integration of the new features in the Engine and Swarm. Distributed Application Bundles (DABs) — Docker announced a new file format that allows teams to build a DAB file from the Docker Compose file that can be traced all the way through the CI/CD pipeline. These will certainly enable a more complete DevOps story.

  • Docker Trusted Registry Image Scanning — Docker integrated project Nautilus to the enterprise Docker Trusted Registry. Project Nautilus performs CVE scanning on images, increasing the security stance of Docker.

  • Docker Store — This one was a bit of a surprise a fell a little flat with audience. Docker Store is a marketplace for containers. Currently, it is a pay to access model. Customers will pay to access a specific software and will have unlimited access to this container image. The revenue model is similar to an the phone app market with a revenue share. Highlights another vector of monetization for Docker.

What Does This Mean for The Enterprise?

Docker is continually investing in Docker to make it easier to build images, trace those images through the CI/CD process, and manage clusters in production. The open source project is also investing in standards to reduce vendor lock in at the container level as more container standards such as Rkt from CoreOS enter the market. Overall, Docker is making containers much more consumable for large enterprise IT shops providing the ease of management, security through their PKI infrastructure, and a better on premise story.

What Does This Mean for Docker?

Announcements on the open source side seem to be making the story for Docker Data Center a little fuzzy. While many businesses will still purchase support licenses for the Docker, I struggle to see strong IT shops and technology companies gravitating towards the enterprise product. Docker Store is an attempt to monetize the Docker Hub and doesn’t provide the same granularity in billing that a AWS Marketplace has. I envision a change in the Docker pricing model coming soon, as large enterprises are buying less licenses and increasing their node sizes inside their data centers.

If your company is looking to get into containers and needs help planning or implementing the process, code, or infrastructure feel free to reach out to me at [email protected].