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Docker Gets Another Huge Cash Infusion
The containerization technology picked up $40 million, nearly doubling its previous funding total.
Docker sits at the center of the red-hot area of virtualization known as "containerization." And because of that position, it continues to be a darling of the venture capital crowd.
Today Sequoia Capital has pumped $40 million in Series C funding, bringing its total funding to $66 million and estimated valuation at $400 million. Early investors in Docker include Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Insight Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang. Docker's containers aim to move beyond the traditional virtual machine with its open-source platform for building, shipping and running distributed applications.
As Docker puts it, the limitation of virtual machines is that they include not only the application, but the required binaries, libraries and an entire guest OS, which could weigh tens of gigabytes, compared with just a small number of megabytes for the actual app. By comparison, the Docker Engine container consists of just the application and its dependencies.
"It runs as an isolated process in user space on the host operating system, sharing the kernel with other containers" according to the company's description. "Thus, it enjoys the resource isolation and allocation benefits of VMs but is much more portable and efficient."
With the release of Docker in June, Microsoft announced support for the Linux-based containers by updating the command-line interface in Azure, allowing customers to build and deploy Docker-based containers in Azure. Microsoft also said customers can manage the VMs with the Docker client. As reported by John Waters, Microsoft's Corey Sanders, manager of the Azure compute runtime, demonstrated this capability at DockerCon at the time.
On the Microsoft Open Technologies blog, evangelist Ross Gardler outlined how to setup and use Docker on the Azure cloud service. According to Gardler, common use cases for Docker include:
- Automating the packaging and deployment of applications
- Creation of lightweight, private PaaS environments
- Automated testing and continuous integration/deployment
- Deploying and scaling web apps, databases and backend services
At VMworld last month, VMware talked up its support for Docker, saying it has teamed with the company, joined by its sister company Pivotal as well as Google, to enable their collective enterprise customers to run and manage apps in containers in public, private and hybrid cloud scenarios as well as on existing VMware infrastructure.
About the Author
Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.