Three months after last appearing on theCUBE at VMworld 2014, Docker Inc. CEO Ben Golub returned to the mobile studio on the occasion of another major partner’s conference to provide an update on what changed at the industry’s hottest cloud startup in the last quarter. The veteran executive shared a by-now familiar story of breakneck growth and a continuously expanding vision.

“If we can liberate developers from all that mundane activity, if we can free the application from the infrastructure, great things are going to happen for everybody. And we’re happy to be a part of that,” Golub told SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier, fresh off his keynote on the third day of Amazon.com’s re:Invent cloud summit. In the address, he revealed an alliance with the retail giant to provide a dedicated service for running Docker instances not unlike what Google introduced a week prior.

Both solutions offer the same value proposition, promising to take the hassle out of managing large-scale deployments with upwards of thousands of containers, but vary significantly under the hood. The main difference lies in how Dockerized applications are managed.

Whereas the search giant’s implementation relies on the Kubernetes technology it open-sourced in July to orchestrate and schedule containers, Amazon uses a homegrown alternative built into its platform. But somewhat uncharacteristically, the retail titan also provides users with the option of using other tools such as Google’s, which reflects what Golub sees as a fundamental competitive requirement in the public cloud: giving developers freedom of choice.

“At the end of the day we just do what’s right for developers, and most of these guys have to do what’s right for developers, too,” he said. “Because if they try to lock people in, if they try to avoid heterogeneity, they get killed.” That reality has put a tremendous amount of momentum behind Docker, attracting tens of thousands of users and hundreds of partners in the year and a half since its namesake container engine launched under an open-source license.

The ecosystem is uniquely important for the company, with cloud providers such as Google and Amazon providing an affordable way of deploying Docker that is playing a major part in driving the adoption of the engine. At the same time, smaller partners such as ClusterHQ Inc. and Zettio Inc. are expanding the breadth of the project with features for handling the operational dimension of running containers, which encompasses everything from storage management to monitoring.

“What we at Docker are trying to do is make sure that all of these things – which are really about making multiple containers work well together – don’t do it in a way that breaks portability and that clean separation from the infrastructure,” Golub explained. The startup is hiring aggressively to maintain that balance amid the rapid growth of the ecosystem, he said, having bolstered its headcount to 70 since his last theCUBE appearance in late August.

That represents a 40 percent increase over three months, a figure that’s fast even by the standards of Silicon Valley’s hyper-growth club. Fueling that rapid expansion is $55 million in funding that Docker raised across two rounds earlier this year, which is also helping to solidify its business model.

Presently, the startup is commercializing the container engine through a combination of professional services and a cloud-based collaboration platform dubbed Docker Hub that was unveiled in June. But Golub indicated that this is just the beginning.

“Docker is all about making developers more productive and providing a lean interface, and then our commercial model is based on selling commercial management software to operations to help them manage a world with Docker containers everywhere,” he said. The startup is apparently moving on a fast track towards general availability. Golub wrapped up the interview by saying that launching that product is a priority for the next two months.

The CEO further revealed that 200 companies have already signed up to purchase the solution, but didn’t detail how the offering will affect Docker’s relations with core partners such as VMware and Microsoft that have already put down roots on the operations side of the application divide. That is a subject for future interviews.

Watch the full interview (13:27)