Closing Out 2020 with More Innovation for Developers

Recently our CEO Scott Johnston took a look back on all that Docker had achieved one year after selling the Enterprise business to Mirantis and refocusing solely on developers. We made significant investments to deliver value-enhancing features for developers, completed strategic collaborations with key ecosystem partners and doubled down on engaging its user community, resulting in a 70% year-over-year increase in Docker usage.  

Even though we are winding down the calendar year, you wouldn’t know it based on the pace at which our engineering and product teams have been cranking out new features and tools for cloud-native development. In this post, I’ll add some context around all the goodness that we’ve released recently.  

Recall that our strategy is to deliver simplicity, velocity and choice for dev teams going from code to cloud with Docker’s collaborative application development platform. Our latest releases, including Docker Desktop 3.0 and Docker Engine 20.10, accelerate the build, share, and run process for developers and teams. 

Higher Velocity Docker Desktop Releases 

With the release of Docker Desktop 3.0.0, we are totally changing the way we distribute Docker Desktop to developers. These changes allow for smaller, faster Docker Desktop releases for increased simplicity and velocity. Specifically:  

• Docker Desktop will move to a single release stream for all users. Now developers don’t have to choose between stability versus getting fixes and features quickly.
• All Docker Desktop updates will be provided as deltas from the previous version. This will reduce the size of a typical update, speeding up your workflow and removing distractions from your day.
• Updates will be downloaded in the background for a more simple experience. All a developer needs to do is restart Docker Desktop. 
• A preview of Docker Desktop on Apple M1 silicon, the most in-demand request on our public roadmap. 

These updates build upon what was a banner year for Docker Desktop. The team has been super hard at work having also collaborated with Snyk on image scanning and collaborating with AWS and Microsoft to deploy from Desktop straight to AWS and Azure, respectively. We also invested in performance improvements to the local development experience, such as CPU improvements on Mac and the WSL2 backend on Windows.   

Docker Engine 20.10

Docker Engine is the industry’s de facto container runtime. It powers millions of applications worldwide, providing a standardized packaging format for diverse applications. This major release of Docker Engine 20.10 continues our investment in the community Engine adding multiple new features including support for cgroups V2, moving multiple features out of experimental into GA including `RUN –mount=type=(cache|secret|ssh|…)`and rootless mode, along with a ton of other improvements to the API, client and build experience. These updates enhance security and increase trust and confidence so that developers can move faster than before.

More 2020 Milestones

In addition to these latest product innovations, we continued to execute on our developer strategy. Other highlights from the year that was 2020 include: 

• 11.3 million monthly active users sharing apps from 7.9 million Docker Hub repositories at a rate of 13.6 billion pulls per month – up 70% year-over-year. 
• Collaborated with Microsoft, AWS, Snyk and Canonical to enhance the developer experience and grow the ecosystem. 
• Docker ranked as the #1 most wanted, the #2 most loved, and the #3 most popular platform according to the 2020 Stack Overflow Survey. 
• Hosted DockerCon Live with more than 80,000 registrants. All of the DockerCon Live 2020 content is on-demand if you missed it.
• Over 80 projects accepted to our open source program.  

Keep an eye out in the new year for the latest and greatest from Docker. You can expect to see us release features and tools that enhance the developer experience for app dev environments, container image management, pipeline automation, collaboration and content. Happy holidays and merry everything! We will “see” you in 2021, Docker fam.