Happy Birthday, Docker š³ 9 Years Young, and the Party is Just Getting Started š„³
News from the Docker Community All-Hands: Docker Extensions, Docker Desktop for Linux, and more!
I attended the virtual Docker Community 9th birthday all-hands session yesterday, and it was great to see so many familiar faces and nicknames in the chat. I canāt quite believe that itās been nine years! š³
I remember the early birthdays celebrated at real-life meetups in Shoreditch, London, where the crowd regularly numbered 500+. What a journey it has been, and from the tone of yesterdayās announcement, Docker and their partners (including Ambassador Labs š) are only just getting started!
Securing the future for the Docker community
After community manager Eva Bojorges opened the show and welcomed us all, Docker CEO Scott Johnston reiterated the incredible journey that we have all been part of over the past nine years. He reminded everyone of the value of the community and stated that the Docker project, technology, and ecosystem have only gone from strength to strength because of this fantastic community.
Scott also announced another round of funding ($105 M, Series C), and Justin Cormack, CTO, followed up with a great blog post emphasizing how Docker the company will be āInvesting In Performance, Trust and Great Experiences for Developers.ā
Extending the capabilities of Docker
Scott continued by assuring everyone that Docker will be investing heavily in the Docker Desktop experience that we all know and love ā including Docker Desktop for Linux! āas well as creating more trusted content and also adding more partner integrations via Docker Extensions (of which Ambassador Labsā Telepresence is one of the launch partners for extensions).
2022 is clearly the year of Linux on the Desktop :)
We all like to poke fun at Linux on the Desktop, but thereās no denying that itās an important user platform for developersā indeed, I was a happy Linux user for many years until I got tempted with the shiny Mac hardware! Until recently, although Docker ran on Linux, you didnāt get quite the same experience as you did on Mac or Windows. But with the launch of Docker Desktop for Linux (DD4L), now you do!
Anca Lordache did a great live demo at the event, and everything you would expect from the Linux version of the tool is included. A few folks in the chat did ask about why DD4L runs a VM for Docker, and Anca shared a link with good answers:
File syncing at speed
Next on the agenda was a great deep dive into the experimental new Mac file-sharing system, VirtioFS. The team did a great job outlining the previous limitations, the new approach, and a few caveats. As a regular user of volume mounts and devcontainers, Iām keen to try this out!
Extend all the things (in Docker)!
Another big announcement at the all-hands was the private preview for the new Docker Extensions, including several extensions and an SDK! As Ambassador Labs is a launch partner here, I knew (in secret) all about this. Our awesome engineering team has been busily working alongside the equally amazing Docker engineering team to integrate Telepresence into Docker Desktop as an extension.
In a nutshell, Telepresence is an open source CNCF project that acts as a two-way proxy between your local development environment and a remote test environment. If youāre looking to improve your microservice testing strategy or speed up your inner development loops, Telepresence is the tool for you. Imagine being able to access from your dev machine any service that is running in a remote K8s cluster as if they were also local, being able to re-route selected traffic from a remote cluster to your local machine, or being able to share the results of your local development changes with teammates ā this is what Telepresence gives you!
The headline for us is that itās now even easier to use the two tools together. As many of our existing community and customers use Telepresence combined with Docker, weāre excited to see what you will do with this integration.
The team and I canāt wait for you to try this out. You can sign up for the Docker & Telepresence private preview, and I look forward to hearing your feedback.
Itās all about the community
The remainder of the event featured excellent talks by folks from the community. Being a Java developer at heart, I mostly hung out in the Java track, although I did sneak into the deep-dives, too.
Melissa McKay kicked off the Java track with a bunch of great advice on why and how to make your Docker images smaller (including a mention of the super useful ādiveā tool for inspecting images):
Nicolas Frankel presented a great session on the different approaches to building Java containers using Docker, including my personal favorite, using CNCF Buildpacks.
As a shameless plug, you can check out my DockerCon EU ā18 talk āContinuous Delivery with Docker Containers and Java: The Good, the Bad, and the Uglyā, which although a few years old, still provides insight into the end-to-end flow of containerizing Java apps.
Near the end of the community show, I snuck into the deep dive track specifically to catch Bret Fisherās talk, as these are always awesome. Here, Bret shared great advice for āAutomation with Docker for CI/CD Workflows.ā This was a tour de force, not only on the core concepts but also on how to use GitHub actions to implement each step in the workflow:
Hereās to the next nine years of the Docker community!
As I wrap up, Iām reminded of the many great times Iāve had being part of the Docker community. From attending the rapidly growing Docker meetups in London back in ~2014, to presenting at DockerCon, and to being part of the team working on the Docker Telepresence Extension, itās been a fantastic ride.
It was great to see so many folks watching the Docker Community live stream, and I look forward to connecting with you again soon ā most likely at the upcoming virtual DockerCon and hopefully soon in real life!
