UPDATED 15:00 EDT / JUNE 03 2020

CLOUD

From code to cloud: DockerCon underscores developer’s influential role in a more volatile world

Docker Inc.’s annual gathering, DockerCon, happened to land on the calendar at the same time as a number of major societal changes. A global pandemic forced previously planned events, including DockerCon, to become virtual. The dramatic shift for many from working in offices to working at home suddenly put a premium on an efficient and reliable online infrastructure.

Online collaboration tools, in the absence of gathering spaces such as conference rooms or coffee houses, became more critical to getting work done than ever before. At the center of this maelstrom was the software developer, tasked with working in collaborative online environments while getting much-needed applications coded and in production to keep businesses running.

Docker Inc. was there to greet developers with open arms, and this has made an impact, according to one survey that ranked the platform as “most wanted” ahead of even Linux and Kubernetes.

“Docker has been through a lot of changes since DockerCon last year,” said Scott Johnston, chief executive officer of Docker. “The most important was, starting last November, our refocusing on developers. And one of the big challenges we’ve been working on is how to help development teams quickly and efficiently get their app from code to cloud. The world needs you — the developers — now more than ever.”

Johnston spoke during the keynote presentations as part of DockerCon LiveJohn Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, and Jenny Burcio, community, advocacy, and developer relations at Docker, also appeared during the keynote event, along with James Governor, co-founder and analyst at RedMonk. Johnston and Governor discussed new tools for developers, partnerships, software development as a team sport, the need for a more inclusive community and the future of distributed work. (* Disclosure below.)

Simplifying development

Docker’s renewed focus on developers could be seen in the announcements made last week during the virtual gathering. The firm unveiled tools for application development teams to collaborate using Docker Desktop and Docker Hub to deploy an app directly from the Docker command line to cloud in two commands.

The goal for Docker was to simplify the work of developers without needing to worry about infrastructure-specific application changes or provisioning and configuring compute, network and storage.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if developers could quickly deploy to the cloud right from their local environment with the commands and workflow they already know?” Johnston asked. “By simplifying away that complexity, these new features help application development teams quickly iterate and get their apps from code to cloud. Helping development teams build, share and run applications is what Docker is all about.”

Docker is also all about partnerships. Among the announcements made during DockerCon was a collaboration with Microsoft Corp. to more tightly integrate Docker Desktop with Azure. Developers can now use native Docker commands to run Azure Container Instances when building applications for the cloud.

“It starts with open standards for applications and application artifacts and active open-source communities around those standards to ensure portability and choice,” Johnston said. “The same Compose file, the same images run locally and on Azure without changes.”

Collaboration and inclusion

The company’s embrace of open-source communities and partners such as Microsoft also points to an important attribute of the software development world. For many, it’s a team sport.

RedMonk’s Governor points to open-source companies such as GitHub Inc. and NPM Inc. as symbolizing the collaborative nature of development work. It’s also encapsulated in Docker’s own motto of “Build, Share, Run,” as defined on the firm’s Facebook page.

“For me, the key word is share,” Governor said. “Development has to be a team sport; it needs to be sharing and it needs to be kind.”

The problem is that kindness and software development are not always close acquaintances. Software development can be a difficult profession; bugs happen and criticism is often more prevalent than praise.

In his keynote, Governor pointed out that the contribution of Linus Torvalds as the principal developer of Linux showed the power of teamwork and collaboration.

“Linux was a wonderfully packaged idea,” Governor said. “What made it important, what made it interesting was finding a central networking pattern for software development so that everybody could work on something at scale. That was really fundamental and foundational.”

Yet, the entrance of new talent into the developer community has not always been greeted with acceptance. Some groups, such as the Twitter Developer Community, have published their own code of conduct in an effort to dial down the hostility.

“We have not been welcoming to new people,” Governor noted. “We call people ‘newbies,’ and that’s super unhelpful. We’ve got to find ways to be more welcoming and more self-sustaining in our communities, because otherwise communities will fail.”

In a time of global pandemic, failure to come together as a community is a poor option. The corporate office has now become virtual, and this stands to fundamentally change the way work gets done moving forward.

Much as the developer community was responsible for establishing collaborative ecosystems, such as Linux and GitHub, it will likely have a say in the new era of remote work. This new era will be fueled by an explosion of applications, an event in which developers, and Docker, expect to fully participate.

“Even Barclays says they’re not going back to having everybody in offices in the way they used to,” Governor said. “It has significant implications for all industries, but definitely for software development. The last 20 years were about distributed computing. The next 20 years will be about distributed work.”

Here’s the complete interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of DockerCon Live. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for DockerCon Live. Neither Docker, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: DockerCon

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