The market for Docker-container-driven technology is evolving fast, with interest from developers and investors alike. Today, continuous integration vendor Shippable announced that it raised $8 million in a Series A round of funding.
The open-source Docker container engine enables a very portable, lightweight form of virtualization that has become increasingly popular over the past year.
Docker is getting tremendous traction with developers, but enterprises will take time to adopt it, Shippable CEO Avi Cavale told eWEEK. Additionally, as the adoption happens in waves, limitations will be uncovered, he said.
“This is going to be a slow iterative process, which will pan out over multiple years,” Cavale said.
Cavale added that Shippable’s rationale for the amount of money it has raised is based on his expectation of the time and resources needed as the adoption process for Docker rolls out.
In the continuous integration (CI) market that Shippable serves, developers often use the open-source Jenkins tool.
Traditional CI tools need a lot of configuration to be useful, and with traditional CI tools, everything is tested on one box and does not represent production at all, Cavale said.
“This is mainly because it takes time to spin up production-like environments using VMs [virtual machines], and it would add too much overhead and cost to do this for every code change,” Cavale explained. “Shippable offers true continuous integration and delivery with everything automated, from code to production or staging.”
Shippable can spin up containerized test environments that perfectly mimic production in a few seconds and automate functional testing, Cavale said. In his view, the Shippable approach is more efficient than traditional CI alternatives since the test environment can also be set up on demand as needed.
Shippable runs in a software-as-a-service model on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, and there is also a dedicated host model. Cavale explained that in the dedicated host model, customers can run builds on their own on-premises or cloud machines, and Shippable’s service provides the orchestration piece.
“It takes less than five minutes to set up, and we believe this is an excellent option for teams that want to stick to their on-premises infrastructure over which they have complete control,” Cavale said. “We also have ‘Shippable in a box’ which is in private beta with few large enterprises.”
Fundamentally, Cavale emphasized that all Shippable needs is a host machine over which it can layer its container fabric, and it’s good to go. So as long as Shippable can securely connect into the box, whether it’s a VMware VM or Openstack VM or even a physical box, Shippable will work with it.
“In other words, we are agnostic to how the machine was spun up, and all we care is that the machine is pingable,” Cavale said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.