Today is a great day for the Docker team and the whole Docker ecosystem.

We are pleased to announce that Docker has closed a $40M Series C funding round led by Sequoia Capital. In addition to giving us significant financial resources, Docker now has the insights and support of a board that includes Benchmark, Greylock, Sequoia, Trinity, and Jerry Yang.

This puts us in a great position to invest aggressively in the future of distributed applications. We’ll be able to significantly expand and build the Docker platform and our ecosystem of developers, contributors, and partners, while developing a broader set of solutions for enterprise users. We are also very fortunate that we’ll be gaining the counsel of Bill Coughran, who was the SVP of Engineering at Google for eight years prior to joining Sequoia, and who helped spearhead the extensive adoption of container-based technologies in Google’s infrastructure.

While the size, composition, and valuation of the round are great, they are really a lagging indicator of the amazing work done by the Docker team and community. They demonstrate the amazing impact our open source project is having. Our user community has grown exponentially into the millions and we have a constantly expanding network of contributors, partners, and adopters. Search on GitHub, and you’ll now find over 13,000 projects with “Docker” in the title.

Docker’s 600 open source contributors can be proud that the Docker platform’s imprint has been so profound, so quickly. Before Docker, containers were viewed as an infrastructure-centric technology that was difficult to implement and remained largely in the purview of web-scale companies. Today, the Docker community has built that low-level technology into the basis of a whole new way to build, ship, and run applications.

Looking forward over the next 18 months, we’ll see another Docker-led transformation, this one aimed at the heart of application architecture. This transformation will be a shift from slow-to-evolve, monolithic applications to dynamic, distributed ones.

SHIFT IN APPLICATIONS

As we see it, apps will increasingly be composed of multiple Dockerized components, capable of being deployed as a logical, Docker unit across any combination of servers, clusters, or data-centers.

DISTRIBUTED, DOCKERIZED APPS

We’ve already seen large-scale web companies (such as GILT, eBay, New Relic, Spotify, Yandex, and Baidu) weaving this new flexibility into the fabric of their application teams. At Gilt, for example, Docker functions as a tool of organizational empowerment, allowing small teams to own discrete services which they use to create innovations they can build into production over 100 times a day. Similar initiatives are also underway in more traditional enterprise environments, including many of the largest financial institutions and government agencies.

This movement towards distributed applications is evident when we look at the activity within Docker Hub Registry, where developers can actively share and collaborate on Dockerized components. In the three months since its launch, the registry has grown beyond 35,000 Dockerized applications, forming the basis for rapid and flexible composition of distributed applications leveraging a large library of stable, pre-built base images.

Future of Distributed Apps: 6 Easy Steps

The past 18 months have been largely about creating an interoperable, consistent format around containers, and building an ecosystem of users, tools, platforms, and applications to support that format (steps 2-4 in the diagram above). Over the next year, you’ll see that effort continue, as we put the proceeds of this round to use in driving advances in multiple areas to fully support multi-Docker container applications. (Steps 5 & 6 in the diagram above). Look for significant advances in orchestration, clustering, scheduling, storage, and networking. You’ll also see continued advances in the overall Docker platform–both Docker Hub and Docker Engine.

The work and feedback we’ve gotten from our customers as they evolve through these Docker-led transformations has profoundly influenced how Docker itself has evolved. We are deeply grateful for those contributions.

The journey we’ve undertaken with our community over the past 18 months has been humbling and thrilling. We are excited and energized for what’s coming next.

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