To make Docker Inc.’s approach to containerized data management enterprise-ready at all levels of production, Docker CEO Ben Golub has organized development under three umbrellas: build/create, ship/store and run/manage. Taking the stage at the DockerCon 2015 for the Day 2 Keynote,Golub outlined the theme of the event: “Docker for Production.”

Within this structure, Docker has focused on bringing on-premise and Cloud support to customers, as well as top-quality commercial support and convenient packaging for easy adoption.

Docker Hub

Golub then introduced Marianna Tessel, the SVP of engineering, to talk about Docker Hub. As Tessel said, “Docker Hub is a Cloud service … basically a Docker SAS, where you can publish and discover images and repositories, and where teams can collaborate in an application workflow and automate around it.”

Since being launched one year ago, she said the service has seen 240,000 users, 150,000 dockerized applications, and 500 million pulls of images, unbelievable growth in only 12 months.

Tessel then introduced Chris Buckley, director of DevOps at Business Insider, Inc., to describe the way his company uses Docker Hub. It primarily works to streamline building and shipping code, ease infrastructure management for applications and speed the production of apps.

This all fits into their broader goals, Tessel said. “We’ve been focusing on quality. And the way I define quality is performance, reliability, stability, scalability, security and user experience. So everything you need as a user to rely on a service in production. We’ve been focused on that. We in fact re-architected the stack [completely], all the way from front end to back end to our infrastructure.”

Registry V2, its new protocol, now makes 80 percent fewer requests, uses 60 percent less bandwidth for each request and has a better caching mechanism and a faster UI.

Docker Trusted Registry

Around the 30-minute mark in the keynote, Scott Johnston, SVP of Product Management, appeared to discuss recent feedback from customers. In order to make Docker production-ready, customers identified five key needs: support, on-premise registry (especially important for industries with high levels of regulation or heightened security needs), networking, security and directory integration.

To meet these needs, Johnston unveiled Docker Trusted Registry. “The requirements were really clear … an on-premise registry that you could put behind your firewall … plug in to LDAP or active directory … manage access control in a responsible way … and, of course, in large organizations, compliance becomes a very important requirement, a very important feature. And so logging all events, all accesses, by all the users on the platform became very, very important.”

The service also has a one-click deploy, a one-click update feature, that Johnston’s team thinks will  make it super easy to deploy in order to improve the user experience. It includes a GUI on the admin console, making it simple to check the host the registry is deployed on, as well as set up and integrate registry with existing authentication systems, minimizing the disruption to existing systems.

Between its early announcement in September in Europe, beta testing in February and an early access program in April, the service has seen early adoption in industries from tech to healthcare, including life sciences and financial services and clients ranging from startups to those in the Fortune 10.

Use-case: Booz Allen Hamilton

Nirmal Mehta, senior lead technologist, Strategic Innovation Group at Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc., Docker Trusted Registry’s first customer, demoed the service for those in attendance. His firm is redesigning the contracting systems for United States government contractors, and he said that one of the biggest challenges is that the government tends to keep monoliths alive in the form of isolated stacks to provide services.

“Each one of these has replicated services. You’re implementing different technologies to do the same exact thing,” he said, like load balancing and other infrastructure management tasks. “About 50 percent or 60 percent of each of these applications, that’s not the business value add to these. That’s just getting the infrastructure running just to support that application. That’s a lot of redundancy.”

Its new, open-source, Cloud-based system uses Docker to take care of common features, and the new system is headed for production in July, hopefully saving tax dollars in the coming years.

Panel: Applications

Next, a panel including Mark Russinovich of Microsoft Azure, Jason McGee of IBM, and Michael Farber of Booz Allen Hamilton discussed the future of distributed apps.

Farber highlighted the acceleration of interest in microservices and Cloud-native applications. “It’s about speed to value. And it’s about a real strong emphasis on reducing time, cost, complexity and risk,” he said. “So the extent to which you can actually get to value for your customer, that’s really what’s framing this whole viral revolution that we’re seeing. The pressures are just that intense.”

Johnston then asked how each company was leading customers through the open source transition. Russinovich answered for Microsoft after making a joke about how the company isn’t typically associated with open source.

“Microsoft’s made a very deliberate effort to have open source as part of our culture and as part of what we enable our customers to do on top of our platforms,” he said. “And there’s lots of examples over the last few years, the first of which is, when Azure launched Infrastructure as a Service at preview, the day one, it launched with Windows and Linux support, and that was a ‘pigs fly’ moment for a lot of people.” He said there has been extensive education in the company about how to use and contribute to open-source projects.

McGee offered his hopes for the future of Docker. “We’ve talked a lot about community this week,” he said. “There’s actually this huge vibrant Docker community, but there are very closely related communities around Cloud Foundry, around OpenStack … and I’d like to see how some of those things come together over the next 12 months, because I think there are a lot of overlapping problems that people are trying to solve together.”

Project Orca

The final demo was from Project Orca, “a top-to-bottom integrated stack that takes the tools and the plumbing that we’ve been talking about for the last couple of days and provides an integration of those in a very prescribed and opinionated manner that can make operations teams successful out of the box in deploying Dockerized distributed apps.” This project is intended to form the cornerstone of the “run/manage” Docker umbrella.

The “Chief Hacker” of project Orca, Evan Hazlett, the senior software engineer, demoed the concept, showing its capabilities for production management.

Johnston concluded the keynote by acknowledging the Docker community. “It doesn’t happen without an ecosystem,” he said, or without customers. “Someone’s got to go first. Someone’s got to have the courage and the vision to step up and say … let’s do it.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of DockerCon.

Image source: SiliconANGLE