Today we’re pleased to announce the acquisition of Tutum, a cloud service used by developers and sysadmins to deploy and manage Docker applications. It’s been an exciting journey with the Tutum team and so we wanted to take a moment to share how we got here as well as what’s ahead.

Build, Ship… and Run

As Solomon shared in his DockerCon SF 2015 keynote, Docker community activity may be visualized as a stack with four layers: Standards, Plumbing, Developer Platform, and Solutions.

Most of the time, individual developers and sysadmins discover Docker through one of the lower three layers. For example, sysadmins and toolmakers mightembed runC, container runtime plumbing, in custom management tools. And individual developers typically use the Docker Toolbox, a development environment, on their laptops to build multi-container distributed apps.

However, as soon as Docker becomes established in an organization, involving multiple people across several app lifecycle stages, tools are necessary to help teams automate and collaborate around delivery pipelines for Docker-based apps. This the purpose of the fourth layer, commercial solutions: to help IT teams build, ship, and run Docker apps in production.

Our first solution, focusing on “Build and Ship,” was Docker Hub, a cloud service for development teams to automate their build pipelines. Docker Hub features integration with source code management and continuous integration (CI) systems as well as organizations and teams support and image repositories. More recently, we introduced the Docker Trusted Registry for those teams wanting to automate their build pipelines on-premise instead of in the cloud.

As teams’ understanding of the Docker platform grows, we’re seeing an increasing number of them extend their use of it to span the entire app lifecycle, from development and testing to staging and production. And while teams initially resort to homegrown, custom scripts to facilitate production deployment of apps, they have expressed to us that they would rather focus 100% on the apps, and couldn’t we provide them solutions to help them “Run”?

Tutum: Everything Teams Need To “Run”

Tutum were early members of the Docker community. Their contributions are many, including curating popular images on Docker Hub, leading Docker meetups in NYC and Madrid, participating in all three DockerCons, and contributing to the Docker project.

As early members of the community, the Tutum folks saw the need for tools to help users deploy and manage Dockerized distributed apps in production. Moreover, they wanted to make it easy for users take advantage of the portability that Docker brings to distributed applications. Thus the Tutum cloud service was born, enabling users to easily:

Provision any infrastructure, on-premise or in the cloud, and automatically install, configure, and cluster Docker Engines.

any infrastructure, on-premise or in the cloud, and automatically install, configure, and cluster Docker Engines. Deploy Docker containers and Docker Compose-defined applications to the provisioned infrastructure from any registry (including Docker Hub).

Docker containers and Docker Compose-defined applications to the provisioned infrastructure from any registry (including Docker Hub). Manage the health, updates, and scaling of Dockerized apps and infrastructure through a GUI Dashboard, CLI, and RESTful APIs.

The results are impressive. Using Tutum’s service, IT teams small and large reported being able to go from code commits to production deployments in as little as 5 minutes. And the easy-to-use service and responsiveness of the Tutum folks generated great word-of-mouth, attracting more than 24,000 users.

The success users were having with the Tutum service combined with our growing respect for the Tutum folks convinced us that a closer relationship just made a lot of sense, and we couldn’t be happier with their joining the Docker team. Borja Burgos, Tutum CEO and co-founder, shares the Tutum journey in his own words in this blog post.

What’s Next

First and foremost, we’re pleased to share that everyone at Tutum is joining Docker. They are passionate, smart people who share our vision of providing the world with “tools of mass innovation.”

Second, we want to be clear that Tutum’s services to provision infrastructure and deploy and manage Docker apps are here to stay. This announcement will bring more users and usage to Tutum’s public Beta, and with the help of your feedback we look forward to making these services even better.

Third, you’ll see some initial integrations with Docker Hub, and there are a lot more to come. Together with Tutum we want to make an even better end-to-end “build, ship, and run” app delivery pipeline for IT teams that is easy to set-up, boosts team collaboration, and speeds up shipping.

We see this acquisition as helping IT teams extend their use of the Docker platform to production enabling the “Run” in “Build, Ship, and Run.”

But don’t take our word for it! Try it for yourself today for free by simply signing-in to Tutum with your Docker Hub account. We look forward to your feedback!

Learn More about Tutum

• Take Tutum for a spin

• Watch this video introduction

• Check out Tutum’s blog post about the acquisition

• Read the press release

• Register for the technical webinar on Nov 4th

Learn More about Docker

• New to Docker? Try our 10 min online tutorial

• Share images, automate builds, and more with a free Docker Hub account

• Read the Docker 1.8 Release Notes

• Subscribe to Docker Weekly

• Register for upcoming Docker Online Meetups

• Attend upcoming Docker Meetups

• Register for DockerCon Europe 2015

• Start contributing to Docker