Docker strategy with containers & its impact on the enterprise business.

Docker, the open source software for containerization has made an unprecedented growth in IT market since its adoption in the last quarter of 2012. Pulling off the features of Linux LXC containers, docker wraps up a piece of software in a complete file-system that contains everything it needs to run: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries – anything one needs to install on a server. This guarantees that it will always run the same, regardless of the environment it is running in.  In such a short time, Docker managed to have 2 billion pulls, $160 million in venture funding and several acquisitions. Beloved by developers, Docker is rapidly making inroads into production IT environments.

Docker's bread and butter is its container format and the core Docker Engine for building and running Docker containers. But its products don't end there, by any means: There's Docker Registry, for image registration; Docker Compose, for defining multicontainer applications; Docker Swarm host for clustering and scheduling and Docker Machine for automated container provisioning. Along side there are two hosted registries -- Docker Hub and Docker Trusted Registry. Currently, Docker has come up with Docker Cloud and Universal Control Plane.

Scott Johnston, COO at Docker in of the interview said "The idea is to focus on the horizontal, with a platform that goes broad, then circle back and provide a hardened stack" This would make Docker not only to the developers but to the whole IT eco-system.

This is where some of the analyst believe that Docker is feeling the heat on rolling out its service on Enterprise platform. Devops Analyst Chris Riley said "Docker has really suffered from the problem of being built by developers for developers, and bottom-up adoption." Developers who have used Docker's open source products for free don't have enough "skin in the game" to force enterprise wide adoption of the technology, which is where it must go next to have long-term success, Riley said.

"A lot of startups do themselves an injustice when they give away the farm," Riley said. "So, they have to expect that fallout and deal with that."

Docker faces a stiff competition from Apache Mesos & Kubernetes when it comes to clustering of the containers at enterprise business level.

At the same time, expansion in so many different areas stretches Docker too thin, according to some observers.

"There's been inertia across a lot of projects, where the number of pull requests is down, or the teams are not as responsive as they used to be," said Aaron Welch, co-founder and SVP at Packet, a New York-based bare-metal cloud provider whose customers are big users of containers.

Docker, though has gained a lot more popularity at the user level , still needs to mature a lot if it wants to establish its footprint at the enterprise market.