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I’m having one of a handful of chats with Ben
Announced to kick off the two-day event, this alliance of 18 companies is a big deal to Golub and the thousands of people who run their code through Docker’s technology every day. Some of the biggest companies in tech are involved: Amazon, Cisco,
“This is a sign that containers have essentially unanimous industry support,” CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi tells me later, perched at a table in the Marriott Marquis hotel lobby in downtown San Francisco, just above the chaos of Docker’s packed event. “Everyone’s at the table, so it’s higher up the stack where the battle will be.”
Friends and battlers—that’s the new reality in the fast-evolving ecosystem of containers. Popularized by Docker’s incredible two-year year rise, containers and the approach to infrastructure they encourage have led to an explosion of startups and venture funding into the space even as the legacy companies look to get involved.
[Now in the July 20 issue: How Docker Escaped Near-Death To Become Software's Next Big Thing]
“Trusted solutions will emerge, but the next couple years will be pretty turbulent,” says Mitchell Hashimoto, founder of a startup called HashiCorp, which raised $10 million in funding in December from three VC firms. Some of the biggest names in investing back Docker, like Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital. But seemingly every firm that invests in the enterprise and doesn’t back Docker is now invested in a fast-follower. “We all believe in this shift,” says Kevin Comolli of Accel London, an investor in Weaveworks, which raised $5 million in December. “Docker was almost too early; they had a little bit of a roller coaster. But now we’re in a technology arms race in IT spending.”
The startups forming up around Docker aren’t clones, at least not yet. Instead they focus on a problem Docker hasn’t gotten to or that only emerges when you’re knee-deep into containers and the new opportunities they bring to run your apps faster and with a more efficient use of your server space. Weaveworks, for example, focuses on networking issues with containers. A startup tackling storage with them, Portworx, raised $8.5 million just days ago.
Those companies draft more clearly off Docker’s success. But where things get more complicated is when you step back and consider that even more are staking their claim to work with Docker and its ilk, but offer different services to run your infrastructure with them. Hashicorp, for example, focuses on workflow that can include Docker but also a range of other sources, Hashimoto says.
Florian Leibert says he was sick of the 3AM wakeup calls he’d get while working at Airbnb because a server had died or an Amazon box had suffered a power outage and reset. His startup, Mesosphere, seeks to eliminate that problem by linking up all of a data center into the equivalent of one big computer that can work around any part that temporarily fails. Customers like Yelp use his product Mesos to launch one million Docker containers every day. “"I think you can think about this like the Windows ecosystem when it first started," Leibert says. “Microsoft became the biggest, but there were a lot of good businesses built on top of it.”
With nearly $50 million raised to date, much of it from a $36 million Series B in December, Mesosphere has some major customers and supporters of its own who’d love to see it equal or surpass Docker in eventual size. “You don’t want container specific companies as opportunities now, but container aware ones,” explains Peter Levine of Andreessen Horowitz, an investor in Mesosphere.
Companies like Google, which has used its own containers in-house for years, don’t want to have to choose, says Polvi at CoreOS, which raised its own $12 million round in April. Google ended up a CoreOS supporter because its container challenger to Docker called Rocket was secure, Polvi says, but it’d rather not have to pick any side. Even Polvi, who ruffled feathers at Docker when he published a blog post questioning Docker’s security and direction in early December, right as Docker hosted its annual European event, sounds relieved that the new standard will help diffuse the narrative that his startup was gunning for Docker’s hegemony. “I was never thrilled with the war story,” he says.
Many of the startups on the container wave have their own open-source projects, and staff at one will typically contribute and be active in governance at another, like CoreOS’ cofounder Brandon Philips working as one of most active of the 1,300 contributors to the Docker project. The cofounder of dotCloud, which morphed into Docker, works at Mesosphere. Even the company that could have the most to lose from the rise of containers, VMware, is a member of the consortium to try to keep a seat at the table. It’s a small community and a young one. Nobody knows just how big it can be. “Docker’s the leader right now, but no one has told these companies how hard it is to become a $5 billion company,” says Paul Santinelli, a former Red Hat director (the world’s biggest open-source operator) and now an investor at North Bridge.
“Everybody tries to kill each other with kindness,” says Solomon Hykes, Docker’s colorful founder and the chief architect of the Docker open-source project. “You want to be the center of gravity, but everyone integrates with everybody, and that’s for the good of the user.”
At Docker, Hykes and Golub say that they know that their company can only succeed if the open-source project and its community thrive. They’ve made hires like their first ever chief of operations for the project, MongoDB’s former chief advocate for its own developers, Steve Francia, and partners like IBM say that Docker’s working closely with them to make sure they start offering paid products in a way that doesn’t undermine the bigger mission.
“If the ecosystem doesn’t make 10 times what Docker is making, we are doing something wrong,” Golub tells Forbes in the company’s new office in San Francisco, part of what a $95 million April fundraise can buy. “The right thing for us as a company, and for the industry, is to focus on adoption, and are users valuing what you can deliver.”
