Today I am extremely proud to announce that the creators of Orchard and Fig – two of the most polished and exciting projects to come out of the Docker ecosystem – are joining the Docker team. Fig is by far the easiest way to orchestrate the deployment of multi-container applications, and has been called “the perfect Docker companion for developers”. As it turns out, these are currently the two most important questions for the tens of thousands of people building applications on the Docker platform:

How to orchestrate Docker containers in a standard way? How to make Docker awesome for developers?

With Fig, Ben and Aanand got closer to an answer than anybody else in the ecosystem. They have a natural instinct for building awesome developer tools, with just the right blend of simplicity and flexibility. They understand the value of a clean, minimal design, but they know from hard-earned experience that every real project needs its share of duct tape and temporary hacks – and you don’t want to be standing between an engineer and their duct tape. By incorporating that experience upstream, we have an opportunity to deliver an awesome solution to these problems, in a standardized and interoperable way, for every Docker user.

First, in parallel to maintaining Fig, Ben and Aanand will help incorporate into Docker the orchestration interfaces that they wished were available when building their own tools on top of it. “There are a thousand ways to implement orchestration. But those should be a thousand plugins, exposed to the developer through a unified, elegant interface”. We agree, and can’t wait to build this interface together.

Second, they will lead a new Developer Experience group – or DX for short. The goal of DX is to make Docker awesome to use for developers. This means anything from fixing UI details, improving Mac and Windows support, providing more tutorials, integrating with other popular developer tools, or simply using Docker a lot and reporting problems.

As usual, all development on Docker happens in the open, and we’re always looking for volunteer contributors and maintainers! If you want to join the Orchestration or DX groups, come say hi on IRC – #docker-dev / Freenode is where all the design discussions happen.

If you’re an Orchard user, there is a detailed post on what this means for you, and what to do next.

Lastly, since Orchard is proudly based in the UK, we are happy to announce that Docker is opening its first European office in London. If you’ve been considering joining Docker but don’t want to move to California – get in touch! We offer both on-site and remote positions.

Welcome Ben and Aanand – let’s go build it!

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