This article is reproduced from InfoQ
Docker has been in a deep existential crisis for the past two years.
After changing the CEO twice in 2019 and resolutely selling the company's business, people once looked down on Docker.
In December 2020, Kubernetes stated that it would deprecate Docker support in version 1.20, making Kubernetes "no longer rely on" Docker, and it makes people feel that Docker may disappear from now on.
But what is surprising is that Docker has seized a major historical opportunity and quickly reorganized into a cloud-native container vendor focused on the developer community, and the rewards brought by it are gradually showing. Just recently, Docker officially announced its B round financing plan totaling 23 million U.S. dollars. This round of financing was led by Tribe Capital, and Benchmark and Insight Partners, who had participated in the A round of financing, also joined it. So far, Docker has raised $58 million in funding.
According to the latest data, the free version of Docker has attracted 1.7 million new registered developers, and the total number of registered users of the community version has exceeded 7.3 million. Docker's current CEO Scott Johnston said in an official blog post that released the financing, "The results have proved everything. This strategy is very powerful in itself, and our execution ability is even better."
In response to this financing, a container technology expert lamented: "For container technology, ease of use is still a key issue hindering its development, but Docker has recently continued to launch some products for developers. I think it is better than what we have done before. Great."
Docker is eight years old
From the announcement of its establishment on March 20, 2013 to the present, Docker is almost exactly eight years old.
Docker was once regarded as one of the most popular start-ups in Silicon Valley. In 2010, French developer Solomon Hykes established an open source project called dotCloud, and the expanded concept helped to significantly simplify the process of creating containers and microservices in web applications.
By running applications in a completely independent environment, this technology called "containers" can greatly improve the speed, security, and stability of development work. Docker is widely praised for its outstanding contributions in the container field.
As the vanguard of this wave, Docker has quickly become a recognized pioneer of the revolution, and has raised US$40 million, US$95 million and US$92 million in 2014, 2015 and 2017 respectively. In the end, Docker's total financing reached 270 million U.S. dollars, which also allowed it to officially enter the Unicorn Club with a market valuation of more than 1 billion U.S. dollars.
At that time, Docker set off a wave of revolution in the development field, and is even expected to become another backbone in the cloud computing battlefield. The aforementioned container technology expert told InfoQ, “We have been deploying container technology since 2006. Docker was actually released in 2013. When I saw the emergence of this technology, I liked its entire design very much: it is very elegant , It turns the complex technology into a very simple abstraction. It turns the container image into an application packaging format, which can allow applications to migrate in different environments. This is a technical ability that developers at the time dream of. Docker's biggest Contribution is to turn a very complex technology into a universal technology and a standard for the entire industry. I think this is the biggest change Docker has brought to this industry. In fact, it is difficult to have a small company to promote the entire industry trend. This is very worthy of recognition."
However, the technology itself is changing rapidly, and any pioneering technology cannot guarantee commercial success. This is particularly evident in open source projects. In order to gain economic benefits, Docker began to create tools to help companies manage container deployment tasks. The most well-known result is the orchestration platform Docker Swarm.
Unfortunately, Docker encountered Google's rival in the market, and the latter created an unmatched similar product, Kubernetes. Google subsequently donated Kubernetes to the Linux Foundation, which will convert Kubernetes into a free and open source project under the guidance of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. As a well-deserved phenomenon-level solution, Kubernetes has greatly weakened the survival space of Docker in the enterprise business field.
The trouble doesn't stop there. Docker has experienced many rotations. In 2017, Steve Singh replaced Ben Golub, and in May 2019, Singh was replaced by Rob Bearden. Bearden's tenure period is even as short as 6 months. In March 2018, founder Hykes announced his official departure from Docker.
Faced with the challenge, Docker decided to act immediately, and in November 2019 decided to sell its corporate business (which accounted for the largest proportion of its revenue at the time) to Mirantis. Mirantis CEO and co-founder Adrian Ionel said that this acquisition accounts for about 90% of Docker's business and will also include partnerships with Microsoft and other companies, all aimed at accelerating Mirantis' internal Kubernetes work. In addition, Docker Enterprise has a group of outstanding cloud-native infrastructure personnel. Talent acquisition is also the focus of this round of acquisitions. 75% of the employees are also packaged and sold to Mirantis.
This acquisition has caused Docker to fall into a quagmire in public opinion, and it seems a bit miserable to sell most of the company's business and developers.
After a year, the transformation has been successful?
After selling the enterprise business, Docker announced on March 11, 2020 that it would reorganize the remaining organization into a development tool company. Focusing business on developers is actually the original intention of Docker in 2013 and 2014. This strategic decision aims to help developers speed up their work, specifically covering the entire development process from initial coding to cloud application deployment. To help with this transformation, Docker raised $35 million in venture capital to restructure the business and appointed Scott Johnston as CEO.
Docker's remaining main products include development and application Docker Desktop and shared container resource repository Docker Hub. The company sells access to these tools to customers through a wealth of subscription options.
As the application development environment gradually shifts from local desktops to cloud computing, developers often need to repeat multiple cumbersome and frequent executions. The entire process is not only complicated and boring, but also easy to cause errors, and the application deployment in actual development also lacks a constraint model.
Docker executives see this trend as a valuable opportunity. They hope to help developers improve production efficiency, while also lowering the threshold for the use of microservices operating environments. Today, Docker has decided to create a "transition space from code to cloud". Docker emphasized, "To truly improve the efficiency of the development team, it is necessary to integrate a variety of technical achievements, especially to establish a comprehensive coverage from source code control to application operation, and has a well-architected pipeline." In May 2020 At the DockerCon development conference, Docker also announced a cooperation plan with Microsoft, including simplifying the operation process of enabling containerized applications on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
In the past year, the free version of Docker has attracted 1.7 million new registrations, and the total number of registered users of the community version has exceeded 7.3 million. Like other open source projects, their goal is to promote community projects first, and then convert a small number of users into paying customers. But before getting into trouble in 2019, Docker has not found an effective business transformation method. Johnston said that although it is not appropriate to release specific figures, the company's annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2020 has increased by 170% year-on-year, indicating that their operating strategy has begun to bear fruit.
The investor Sethi said in a statement, "Tribe is committed to discovering new value extremes, that is, top private technology companies that have shown growth inflection points, and hope to help them expand their scale through long-term venture capital to achieve better operations. Results. Docker fits our judgment, and we look forward to supporting them and helping them continue to succeed."
Finally, the company said it will also invest in the expansion of Docker Hub. Johnston said that Docker will work to increase the choice of downloadable application components and build "other tools to help development teams improve the confidence, security, and visibility of the software supply chain." At the same time, it will continue to strengthen the ecological construction, enhance the interoperability with popular container orchestration tools (such as Kubernetes, AWS ECS, Azure ACI, Swarm), and increase 100% of the main container runtime (such as Docker Engine, containerd) Compatibility, and will work with ecosystem partners to promote the construction of open standards (for example, OCI, Compose spec, Notary v2).
Maybe Docker will never be able to reproduce the original brilliant posture that is unparalleled in the world, but this transformation can at least help them get out of the development quagmire that has caused countless start-ups.