DockerCon 17 Focuses on Enterprise Adoption of Containers

The DockerCon 17 conference, held April 17-20 in Austin, Texas, provided a showcase for the latest and greatest in container technologies. At the show, Docker Inc., the lead sponsor of the open-source Docker application container project, made several announcements, including the introduction of a LinuxKit build-your-operating-system effort, as well as a professional services program to help organizations move applications to a modern microservices architecture. Enterprise adoption was also a hot topic at the event, with large organizations including Visa, MetLife and Intuit discussing their Docker adoption efforts. In this slide show, eWEEK looks at some of the highlights of the DockerCon 17 conference.

During his DockerCon Day 1 keynote, Docker CEO Ben Golub provided numbers on Docker adoption. There are now at least 14 million Docker hosts and 900,000 Docker applications available.

Docker founder Solomon Hykes announced the new LinuxKit effort during his keynote address. The goal with LinuxKit is to provide a container-optimized operating system for Docker container delivery.

Docker announced a service to help modernize traditional apps at DockerCon 17. Docker worked with partners including Avanade, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Microsoft to define a proscriptive fixed time and price professional services program to help organizations figure out a microservices strategy.

Looking forward, the upcoming Docker 17.05 release will provide a new multistage build capability that will reduce the size of container applications.

Intuit was among the enterprise users at DockerCon 17 that talked about using Docker. Inuit’s online tax preparation services are powered by a Docker back end.

Visa is one of the world’s most trusted brands, and at DockerCon 17, Swamy Kocherlakota, senior vice president and global head of infrastructure and operations at Visa, explained why Visa trusts Docker. Visa has already been using Docker in production for six months, using it to enable 100,000 transaction per day.

Aaron Ades, assistant vice president, solutions engineering at MetLife, explained why the 150-year-old insurance vendor moved to Docker. By moving to a container and microservices model, MetLife has been able to have more modular workloads and is now making use of the public cloud, he said.

Docker Engineer Michael Crosby used his DockerCon 17 session to explain how vulnerabilities are managed by the open-source project.

Docker makes use of a technology approach known as The Update Framework (TUF) that provides a multistep process to secure updates. In a DockerCon 17 session, Justin Cappos, assistant professor at New York University, explained how TUF works.

The next DockerCon conference will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, Oct. 16-18.