Docker, Inc. announced a new $95 million funding round, marking another major endorsement for the fast-growing startup whose container technology is the latest craze in cloud development.

This new round of funding was led by Insight Venture Partners, with new contributions from Coatue, Goldman Sachs and Northern Trust. Existing investors Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Trinity Ventures and Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures also participated in the round. The inclusion of several financial institutions in this round is significant because it marks an endorsement by user companies of container technology.

The financing further validates investor confidence in the commercialization of open source software and of “containers,” which are essentially simplified virtual machines that provide basic services needed to support software development. Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman has called containers the “holy grail” for cloud developers looking to scale applications in agile and elastic cloud infrastructure.

“Enterprises need to become familiar with containers today and start testing and defining the approach to adopting this technology,” wrote Miniman and Wikibon analyst Steve Chambers in a report published yesterday.

Container Madness – Developer Productivity

Containers are the latest technology to emerge from an approach to development pioneered more than a decade ago by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon introduced highly iterative approaches to building applications involving frequent updates, reducing dependencies by leveraging loosely coupled architectures and designing software to scale across thousands of servers.

Container technology has been used in production systems at Google for about a decade, which is a proving ground for scalability, management and reliability, although Google’s environment is more heterogeneous than that found in a typical enterprise.  The container concept goes back to 1979.

Containers are now emerging as the preferred way for application developers to build and run their software anywhere.  Vendors are swarming to embrace the technology, including the leaders and challengers in cloud and enterprise IT.  Even Microsoft, which long shunned open source software, has made major commitments to support Docker in its cloud.

More Money, More Speed

The new financing will enable deeper integration with go-to-market partners such as AWS, IBM and Microsoft and fuel new platform capabilities across the application development lifecycle, solidifying Docker’s pole position as the foundation for a new generation of distributed applications.

However, Docker reportedly hasn’t even spent all the money it raised in its B round, much less the $40 million in Series C financing it received in September.

“The combination of strong product demand and a rapidly expanding ecosystem has put Docker on a growth trajectory far beyond what most companies experience in this phase of their development,” said Ben Golub, CEO of Docker. “This will allow us to do more acquihires and expand product capabilities and leadership.”

Enterprises have reported that Docker shrinks deployment cycles from weeks to minutes in some cases, and that it drives up to a 20-fold improvement in resource efficiency. More than 300 million instances of Docker’s technology have been downloaded from its hosted service, Docker Hub, since the technology burst on the scene two years ago.

Docker sees its technology as more than just a productivity platform. “Our responsibility is to give people the tools they need to create applications that weren’t possible before,” said Solomon Hykes, founder and CTO of Docker. Enterprises, he added, are “looking for a platform that helps them build and ship applications in a truly standardized way, without lock-in or unwanted bundled features. The financing enables us to deliver on that promise.”

Attracting Attention – and Competition

Docker has gained endorsements from many of the industry’s major players, and also a little competition:

• Red Hat, Inc. was so committed to Docker that it delayed the release of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 platform to make sure Docker containers could be fully supported (See the interview with Docker founder Solomon Hykes on theCUBE at Red Hat Summit below).  OpenShift, the Red Hat platform-as-a-service, also works with Docker.
• Microsoft recently announced Windows Server Container, a Docker-like technology that addresses some complaints about Docker security but that runs only on Windows. While the Docker Linux-based and Windows containers won’t be compatible, they will both be able to be managed with the same Docker tools. This solution will include Azure cloud and on-premises (with Windows and Hyper-V).
• AWS EC2 Container Service enables users to run applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. It’s in preview mode right now.
• VMware supports containers in its virtual machines and also in the vCloud Air hybrid cloud).  Although some people have said containers are a threat to VMware, Chief Technology Officer Kit Colbert has said that the two technologies are complementary.
• Pivotal Software, Inc. has integrated with Docker and Rocket in its latest evolution of Pivotal CF (CloudFoundry) with Lattice.
• The OpenStack Foundation is working on Dock integration and IBM, an OpenStack contributor, has announced Enterprise Containers.
• The Kubernetes cloud platform, which was originally developed by Google, is now managing containers at a massive scale. This recent episode of the Cloudcast podcast with Kismatic, Inc. CEO Patrick Reilly offers a good primer on this topic.
• Apache Mesos supports Docker containers in its distributed systems manager. Mesos is credited with helping Twitter to scale globally (See theCUBE interview with Mesosphere CEO Florian Leibert from OpenStack Silicon Valley).
• CoreOS, Inc. was originally a contributor to Docker’s container project but split off to build its own Rocket container.

According to Wikibon’s Steve Chambers “2015 is likely to see an exponential take-up in containers across the industry compared to 2014.  It is crucial for enterprises to get onto the front foot and lean in to containers to start testing them out now, as they will cause a change in the enterprise (e.g. skills, operations, workflows) that are historically slow to change due to enterprise complexity.

“Containers and the ecosystem around them should be considered as a catalyst for change in the enterprise, to remove processes, infrastructure complexity, cloud lock in and speed up innovation.”

BONUS – @theCUBE Coverage of Docker’s Evolution

Here are video interviews on theCUBE, including conversations with Docker Founder & CTO Solomon Hykes, CEO Ben Golub and VC investor Steve Herrod.

Interviewed at the Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, Solomon tells how Docker became the mega-star of cloud DevOps.

Docker CTO:  Solomon Hykes at Red Hat Summit 2014 – TheCUBE

Docker CEO:  Ben Golub at AWS:ReInvent – theCUBE

Docker CEO:  Ben Golub at VMworld 2014 – theCUBE

Docker VC Investor: Jerry Chen at VMworld 2014 – theCUBE