Democratizing Docker for Enterprise

Written by: Manuel Weiss

3 min read

On the second day of DockerCon in Seattle, Docker CEO Ben Golub announced major improvements to handle enterprise needs with Docker. Golub said that the most security-conscious organizations on the planet are now adopting Docker to address their security concerns and announced partnerships with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Microsoft Azure, and AWS.

In his keynote, Golub stated that 60 percent of users deploy at least one Docker app to production. He laid out the path for enterprise customers on how to move their monolithic legacy apps to a modern microservice architecture.

Today, Docker boasts around 150 enterprise customers and 10,000 cloud customers. Enterprise customers include financial institutions like PayPal, VISA, Société Générale, Goldman Sachs, and ADP, as well as companies from the health and government sectors, such as the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Some case studies can be found here.

The top use cases that Docker sees for its enterprise customers are (in order of occurrence):

  • Setting up Continuous Delivery workflows

  • Migrating legacy apps to microservices

  • Containerizing a legacy app to achieve portability and more flexibility

  • Continuous Integration

Golub stressed that a strong ecosystem is key to building good solutions.

Incremental Revolution Inside Enterprises

Golub mentioned that a lot of Docker's enterprise customers start off with small incremental changes. As a general progression, enterprise customers usually follow these steps:

  • Dockerize low-risk app

  • Add more team members

  • Work toward agile setup

  • Work toward microservice architecture

  • Move to the cloud

In order to make the move toward Docker easier, Docker introduced vast improvements to its Universal Control Panel (UCP) and the Docker Trusted Registry (DTR). By using these services, customers can set up self-healing, self-organizing systems that are constantly monitoring themselves for vulnerabilities, keeping bad containers out of their environments, keeping bad containers from doing bad things, and making it trivial to change out containers.

The Docker Store

Docker launched the Docker Store, a marketplace for validated software and tools. The goal of the store is to bring Docker users and ecosystem partners together.

Introducing Docker Store: trusted, compliant containers ready for production. Both free & commercial #dockercon pic.twitter.com/deFxYO0Fq2

— Solomon Hykes (@solomonstre) June 21, 2016

Especially interesting is that the store provides enterprise users with compliant, commercially supported software from trusted and verified publishers, packaged as Docker images. Docker provides a scalable self-service system for ISVs to publish and distribute trusted and enterprise-ready content.

Docker Support Partners

Docker announced partnerships with Hewlett Packard Enterprises, Microsoft Azure, and AWS. The partnership for HPE includes servers that ship with Docker Commercial Engine/Support, Docker Datacenter availability through all HPE channels, and integrated solutions with hardware, software, support, and services.

Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich showed that Docker Datacenter is deeply integrated with Microsoft Azure and demoed that Microsoft is working very hard to support containers.

Mark Russinovich CTO for #Microsoft #Azure at #DockerCon uses Docker for Mac to fix C# on a Mac in VSCode #DockerCon pic.twitter.com/Rds3QyrANz

— Avi Vaid (@avivaid96) June 21, 2016

In summary, the General Session and announcements at DockerCon 2016 Day 2 revolved around showcasing that Docker is ready to support enterprise organizations. Docker particularly tackled concerns around security challenges and technical challenges, providing simple solutions with excellent user experience.

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