JAX Innovation Awards 2014 Spotlight: Docker

Part of a special series showcasing our final nominees, we find out what keeps this container engine open.
Category: Most innovative Open Technology
Technology: Docker
Interviewee: Julien Barbier
1) Can you tell our readers a little more about Docker?
Docker is an open-source project to easily create lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale, in production, on VMs, bare metal, OpenStack clusters, public clouds and more.
2) Can you explain what problems you solve with your technology?
- Application lifecycle Management with CI/CD being a major use case (including separation of concerns (dev vs ops))
- Disruptive economics with an Alternative form of virtualization
- Agility – Scale-out, down, up…rapidly
- Development flexibility (laptop, datacenter, hybrid/private/public cloud) to deliver Cross Cloud Deployment
- Rackspace
- Baidu
- Yandex
- ebay
- Spotify
- opentable
- cloudflare
- mailgun
- relateiq
- rethinkdb
- Gilt, Yelp, New Relic…
4) What’s on the roadmap ahead for you?
Docker 1.0 is the next big release for our product. Meaning stable, ready for production software.
5) Why do you think Open Technologies are important for truly innovative IT?
Docker is open source since the very beginning. We think this is important because everybody has a lot of great ideas, not only employees. We have 400+ contribnutors to the projects, 95% being non-employees. That’s 400+ brains, and 20 times more ideas than if we were a closed technology.