DockerCon 2017 showed a vibrant market rapidly priming itself for ongoing growth, reach, diversification, innovation, and world-scale opportunities going forward.
This DockerCon was considerably larger than in previous years and will almost certainly be much larger next year, both in the US and in its European counterpart. Startups are entering this space at a rapid clip, many of whom are coming from traditional developer, infrastructure, middleware, and applications segments. The substantial commitments by Microsoft, Oracle, HP, Red Hat, IBM, AWS, Google, and other enterprise and infrastructure platform providers will bring their respective developer and partner ecosystems more completely into the Docker ecosystem, causing the entire segment to grow exponentially.
One segment of the Docker ecosystem that is still tiny—application services—will probably loom much larger in coming years, especially as developers everywhere containerize the new generation of artificial intelligence, deep learning, and cognitive computing apps for hybrid clouds, mobile applications, Internet of Things edge applications, streaming media, consumer electronics, and other growth segments. It’s encouraging to see Docker Inc play up its community engagement and developer enablement activities, which will be essential to boosting innovation as more ISVs Dockerize their apps from the get-go, or refactor or migrate them to take advantage of the containerization and orchestration capabilities of the growing cloud-native stack that is coalescing around Docker. In this respect, this latest DockerCon’s key announcements—LinuxKit, Moby Project, and MTA—will have a multiplier effect on the development and scaling of the Docker ISV ecosystem.
For further nuance on Wikibon’s takeaways, please check out the Day Two wrapup with Stuart Miniman and myself on theCube at DockerCon 2017. And here was the buzz on DockerCon 2017 on Crowdchat during the event.
