Docker Archives - Page 2 of 5 - Product Management Confabulation

March 10, 2021

Aqua Security raises $135M at a $1B valuation for its cloud native security service

Aqua Security, a Boston- and Tel Aviv-based security startup that focuses squarely on securing cloud-native services, today announced that it has raised a $135 million Series E funding round at a $1 billion valuation. The round was led by ION Crossover Partners. Existing investors M12 Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Insight Partners, TLV Partners, Greenspring Associates and Acrew Capital also participated. In total, Aqua Security has now raised $265 million since it was founded in 2015.

The company was one of the earliest to focus on securing container deployments. And while many of its competitors were acquired over the years, Aqua remains independent and is now likely on a path to an IPO. When it launched, the industry focus was still very much on Docker and Docker containers. To the detriment of Docker, that quickly shifted to Kubernetes, which is now the de facto standard. But enterprises are also now looking at serverless and other new technologies on top of this new stack.

“Enterprises that five years ago were experimenting with different types of technologies are now facing a completely different technology stack, a completely different ecosystem and a completely new set of security requirements,” Aqua CEO Dror Davidoff told me. And with these new security requirements came a plethora of startups, all focusing on specific parts of the stack.

Image Credits: Aqua Security

What set Aqua apart, Dror argues, is that it managed to 1) become the best solution for container security and 2) realized that to succeed in the long run, it had to become a platform that would secure the entire cloud-native environment. About two years ago, the company made this switch from a product to a platform, as Davidoff describes it.

“There was a spree of acquisitions by CheckPoint and Palo Alto [Networks] and Trend [Micro],” Davidoff said. “They all started to acquire pieces and tried to build a more complete offering. The big advantage for Aqua was that we had everything natively built on one platform. […] Five years later, everyone is talking about cloud-native security. No one says ‘container security’ or ‘serverless security’ anymore. And Aqua is practically the broadest cloud-native security [platform].”

One interesting aspect of Aqua’s strategy is that it continues to bet on open source, too. Trivy, its open-source vulnerability scanner, is the default scanner for GitLab’s Harbor Registry and the CNCF’s Artifact Hub, for example.

“We are probably the best security open-source player there is because not only do we secure from vulnerable open source, we are also very active in the open-source community,” Davidoff said (with maybe a bit of hyperbole). “We provide tools to the community that are open source. To keep evolving, we have a whole open-source team. It’s part of the philosophy here that we want to be part of the community and it really helps us to understand it better and provide the right tools.”

In 2020, Aqua, which mostly focuses on mid-size and larger companies, doubled the number of paying customers and it now has more than half a dozen customers with an ARR of over $1 million each.

Davidoff tells me the company wasn’t actively looking for new funding. Its last funding round came together only a year ago, after all. But the team decided that it wanted to be able to double down on its current strategy and raise sooner than originally planned. ION had been interested in working with Aqua for a while, Davidoff told me, and while the company received other offers, the team decided to go ahead with ION as the lead investor (with all of Aqua’s existing investors also participating in this round).

“We want to grow from a product perspective, we want to grow from a go-to-market [perspective] and expand our geographical coverage — and we also want to be a little more acquisitive. That’s another direction we’re looking at because now we have the platform that allows us to do that. […] I feel we can take the company to great heights. That’s the plan. The market opportunity allows us to dream big.”

2020 was a record year for Israel’s security startup ecosystem

March 3, 2021

Scarf helps open-source developers track how their projects are being used

Almost by default, open-source developers get very little insight into who uses their projects. In part, that’s the beauty of open source, but for developers who want to monetize their projects, it’s also a bit of a curse because they get very little data back from these projects. While you usually know who bought your proprietary software — and those tools often send back some telemetry, too — that’s not something that holds true for open-source code. Scarf is trying to change that.

In its earliest incarnation, Scarf founder Avi Press tried to go the telemetry route for getting this kind of data. He had written a few successful developer tools and as they got more popular, he realized that he was spending an increasingly large amount of time supporting his users.

Scarf co-founder and CEO Avi Press (Image Credits: Scarf)

“This project was now really sapping my time and energy, but also clearly providing value to big companies,” he said. “And that’s really what got me thinking that there’s probably an opportunity to maybe provide support or build features just for these companies, or do something to try to make some money from that, or really just better support those commercial users.” But he also quickly realized that he had virtually no data about how the project was being used beyond what people told him directly and download stats from GitHub and other places. So as he tried to monetize the project, he had very little data to inform his decisions and he had no way of knowing which companies to target directly that were already quietly using his code.

“If you were working at any old company — pushing code out to an app or a website — if you pushed out code without any observability, that would be reckless. You would you get fired over something like that. Or maybe not, but it’s a really poor decision to make. And this is the norm for every domain of software — except open source.”

Image Credits: Scarf

That led to the first version of Scarf: a package manager that would provide usage analytics and make it easy to sell different versions of a project. But that wasn’t quite something the community was ready to accept — and a lot of people questioned the open-source nature of the project.

“What really came out of those conversations, even chatting with people who were really, really against this kind of approach — everyone agrees that the package registries already have all of this data. So NPM and Docker and all these companies that have this data — there are many, many requests of developers for this data,” Press said, and noted that there is obviously a lot of value in this data.

So the new Scarf now takes a more sophisticated approach. While it still offers an NPM library that does phone home and pixel tracking for documentation, its focus is now on registries. What the company is essentially launching this week is a kind of middle layer between the code and the registry that allows developers to, for example, point users of their containers to the Scarf registry first and then Scarf sits in front of the Docker Hub or the GitHub Container Registry.

“You tell us, where are your containers located? And then your users pull the image through Scarf and Scarf just redirects the traffic to wherever it needs to go. But then all the traffic that flows through Scarf, we can expose that to the maintainers. What company did that pull come from? Was it on a laptop or on CI? What cloud provider was it on? What container runtime was it using? What version of the software did they pull down? And all of these things that are actually pretty trivial to answer from this traffic — and the registries could have been doing this whole time but unfortunately have not done so.”

To fund its efforts, Scarf recently raised a $2 million seed funding round led by Wave Capital, with participation from 468 Capital and a number of angel investors.

August 13, 2020

Mirantis acquires Lens, an IDE for Kubernetes

Mirantis, the company that recently bought Docker’s enterprise business, today announced that it has acquired Lens, a desktop application that the team describes as a Kubernetes integrated development environment. Mirantis previously acquired the team behind the Finnish startup Kontena, the company that originally developed Lens.

Lens itself was most recently owned by Lakend Labs, though, which describes itself as “a collective of cloud native compute geeks and technologists” that is “committed to preserving and making available the open-source software and products of Kontena.” Lakend open-sourced Lens a few months ago.

Image Credits: Mirantis

“The mission of Mirantis is very simple: we want to be — for the enterprise — the fastest way to [build] modern apps at scale,” Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel told me. “We believe that enterprises are constantly undergoing this cycle of modernizing the way they build applications from one wave to the next — and we want to provide products to the enterprise that help them make that happen.”

Right now, that means a focus on helping enterprises build cloud-native applications at scale and, almost by default, that means providing these companies with all kinds of container infrastructure services.

“But there is another piece of this of the story that’s always been going through our minds, which is, how do we become more developer-centric and developer-focused, because, as we’ve all seen in the past 10 years, developers have become more and more in charge off what services and infrastructure they’re actually using,” Ionel explained. And that’s where the Kontena and Lens acquisitions fit in. Managing Kubernetes clusters, after all, isn’t trivial — yet now developers are often tasked with managing and monitoring how their applications interact with their company’s infrastructure.

“Lance makes it dramatically easier for developers to work with Kubernetes, to build and deploy their applications on Kubernetes, and it’s just a huge obstacle-remover for people who are turned off by the complexity of Kubernetes to get more value,” he added.

“I’m very excited to see that we found a common vision with Adrian for how to incorporate lens and how to make life for developers more enjoyable in this cloud -native technology landscape,” Miska Kaipiainen, the former CEO Kontena and now Mirantis’ Director of Engineering, told me.

He describes Lens as an IDE for Kubernetes. While you could obviously replicate Lens’ functionality with existing tools, Kaipiainen argues that it would take 20 different tools to do this. “One of them could be for monitoring, another could be for logs. A third one is for command-line configuration, and so forth and so forth,” he said. “What we have been trying to do with Lens is that we are bringing all these technologies [together] and provide one single, unified, easy to use interface for developers, so they can keep working on their workloads and on their clusters, without ever losing focus and the context on what they are working on.”

Among other things, Lens includes a context-aware terminal, multi-cluster management capabilities that work across clouds, and support for the open-source Prometheus monitoring service.

For Mirantis, Lens is a very strategic investment and the company will continue to develop the service. Indeed, Ionel said that the Lens team now basically has unlimited resources.

Looking ahead, Kaipiainen said that the team is looking at adding extensions to Lens through an API within the next couple of months. “Through this extension API, we are actually able to collaborate and work more closely with other technology vendors within the cloud technology landscape so they can start plugging directly into the Lens UI and visualize the data coming from their components, so that will make it very powerful.”

Ionel also added that the company is working on adding more features for larger software teams to Lens, which is currently a single-user product. A lot of users are already using Lens in the context of very large development teams, after all.

While the core Lens tools will remain free and open-source, Mirantis will likely charge for some new features that require a centralized service for managing them. What exactly that will look like remains to be seen, though.

If you want to give Lens a try, you can download the Windows, macOS and Linux binaries here.

July 9, 2020

Docker partners with AWS to improve container workflows

Docker and AWS today announced a new collaboration that introduces a deep integration between Docker’s Compose and Desktop developer tools and AWS’s Elastic Container Service (ECS) and ECS on AWS Fargate. Previously, the two companies note, the workflow to take Compose files and run them on ECS was often challenging for developers. Now, the two companies simplified this process to make switching between running containers locally and on ECS far easier .

“With a large number of containers being built using Docker, we’re very excited to work with Docker to simplify the developer’s experience of building and deploying containerized applications to AWS,” said Deepak Singh, the VP for Compute Services at AWS. “Now customers can easily deploy their containerized applications from their local Docker environment straight to Amazon ECS. This accelerated path to modern application development and deployment allows customers to focus more effort on the unique value of their applications, and less time on figuring out how to deploy to the cloud.”

In a bit of a surprise move, Docker last year sold off its enterprise business to Mirantis to solely focus on cloud-native developer experiences.

“In November, we separated the enterprise business, which was very much focused on operations, CXOs and a direct sales model, and we sold that business to Mirantis,” Docker CEO Scott Johnston told TechCrunch’s Ron Miller earlier this year. “At that point, we decided to focus the remaining business back on developers, which was really Docker’s purpose back in 2013 and 2014.”

Today’s move is an example of this new focus, given that the workflow issues this partnership addresses had been around for quite a while already.

It’s worth noting that Docker also recently engaged in a strategic partnership with Microsoft to integrate the Docker developer experience with Azure’s Container Instances.

Docker expands relationship with Microsoft to ease developer experience across platforms

Mirantis acquires Docker Enterprise

May 28, 2020

Mirantis releases its first major update to Docker Enterprise

In a surprise move, Mirantis acquired Docker’s Enterprise platform business at the end of last year and while Docker itself is refocusing on developers, Mirantis kept the Docker Enterprise name and product. Today, Mirantis is rolling out its first major update to Docker Enterprise with the release of version 3.1.

For the most part, these updates are in line with what’s been happening in the container ecosystem in recent months. There’s support for Kubernetes 1.17 and improved support for Kubernetes on Windows (something the Kubernetes community has worked on quite a bit in the last year or so). Also new is Nvidia GPU integration in Docker Enterprise through a pre-installed device plugin, as well as support for Istio Ingress for Kubernetes and a new command-line tool for deploying clusters with the Docker Engine.

In addition to the product updates, Mirantis is also launching three new support options for its customers that now give them the option to get 24×7 support for all support cases, for example, as well as enhanced SLAs for remote managed operations, designated customer success managers and proactive monitoring and alerting. With this, Mirantis is clearly building on its experience as a managed service provider.

What’s maybe more interesting, though, is how this acquisition is playing out at Mirantis itself. Mirantis, after all, went through its fair share of ups and downs in recent years, from high-flying OpenStack platform to layoffs and everything in between.

“Why we do this in the first place and why at some point I absolutely felt that I wanted to do this is because I felt that this would be a more compelling and interesting company to build, despite maybe some of the short-term challenges along the way, and that very much turned out to be true. It’s been fantastic,” Mirantis CEO and co-founder Adrian Ionel told me. “What we’ve seen since the acquisition, first of all, is that the customer base has been dramatically more loyal than people had thought, including ourselves.”

Ionel admitted that he thought some users would defect because this is obviously a major change, at least from the customer’s point of view. “Of course we have done everything possible to have something for them that’s really compelling and we put out the new roadmap right away in December after the acquisition — and people bought into it at very large scale,” he said. With that, Mirantis retained more than 90 percent of the customer base and the vast majority of all of Docker Enterprise’s largest users.

Ionel, who almost seemed a bit surprised by this, noted that this helped the company to turn in two “fantastic” quarters and was profitable in the last quarter, despite the COVID-19.

“We wanted to go into this acquisition with a sober assessment of risks because we wanted to make it work, we wanted to make it successful because we were well aware that a lot of acquisitions fail,” he explained. “We didn’t want to go into it with a hyper-optimistic approach in any way — and we didn’t — and maybe that’s one of the reasons why we are positively surprised.”

He argues that the reason for the current success is that enterprises are doubling down on their container journeys and because they actually love the Docker Enterprise platform, like infrastructure independence, its developer focus, security features and ease of use. One thing many large customers asked for was better support for multi-cluster management at scale, which today’s update delivers.

“Where we stand today, we have one product development team. We have one product roadmap. We are shipping a very big new release of Docker Enterprise. […] The field has been completely unified and operates as one salesforce, with record results. So things have been extremely busy, but good and exciting.”

Mirantis acquires Docker Enterprise

May 27, 2020

Docker expands relationship with Microsoft to ease developer experience across platforms

When Docker sold off its enterprise division to Mirantis last fall, that didn’t mark the end of the company. In fact, Docker still exists and has refocused as a cloud-native developer tools vendor. Today it announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft around simplifying running Docker containers in Azure.

As its new mission suggests, it involves tighter integration between Docker and a couple of Azure developer tools including Visual Studio Code and Azure Container Instances (ACI). According to Docker, it can take developers hours or even days to set up their containerized environment across the two sets of tools.

The idea of the integration is to make it easier, faster and more efficient to include Docker containers when developing applications with the Microsoft tool set. Docker CEO Scott Johnston says it’s a matter of giving developers a better experience.

“Extending our strategic relationship with Microsoft will further reduce the complexity of building, sharing and running cloud-native, microservices-based applications for developers. Docker and VS Code are two of the most beloved developer tools and we are proud to bring them together to deliver a better experience for developers building container-based apps for Azure Container Instances,” Johnston said in a statement.

Among the features they are announcing is the ability to log into Azure directly from the Docker command line interface, a big simplification that reduces going back and forth between the two sets of tools. What’s more, developers can set up a Microsoft ACI environment complete with a set of configuration defaults. Developers will also be able to switch easily between their local desktop instance and the cloud to run applications.

These and other integrations are designed to make it easier for Azure and Docker common users to work in in the Microsoft cloud service without having to jump through a lot of extra hoops to do it.

It’s worth noting that these integrations are starting in Beta, but the company promises they should be released some time in the second half of this year.

Docker regroups as cloud-native developer tool company

March 10, 2020

Docker regroups as cloud-native developer tool company

Docker had an existential crisis last year when, in a matter of months, CEO Steve Singh stepped down, the company sold its enterprise business to Mirantis and long-time executive Scott Johnston took over as CEO. It was a lot to process.

The organization that remained decided to regroup as a developer tools company, and today the new entity officially begins its journey.

Johnston recounted what happened at the end of last year as Docker moved on from the enterprise business and returned to its developer roots.

“In November, we separated the enterprise business, which was very much focused on operations, CXOs and a direct sales model, and we sold that business to Mirantis,” Johnston told TechCrunch. “At that point, we decided to focus the remaining business back on developers, which was really Docker’s purpose back in 2013 and 2014.”

What Docker has in its favor is that it’s the company that popularized the idea of containerizing software. It is hoping to build on that expertise and brand recognition with the newly configured company. To that end, it’s aiming to reduce some of the growing complexity around building, shipping and running cloud native applications.

Mirantis acquires Docker Enterprise

Docker has decided to focus on three areas in particular. The first is to deal with the growing volume of containers. Johnston says that, in the early days, the container was almost magical. But today, applications consist of dozens or even hundreds of containers, creating a layer of complexity that Johnston believes tools like Docker App, Docker Compose and third-party partner integration can help solve.

The next piece is managing the tool chain itself as companies move through a continuous delivery cycle and work with Git repositories like GitHub and BitBucket. He sees a market that has fragmented and created tool silos around the different pieces of the chain as developers move the application from source to the cloud. Docker offers Docker Desktop and Docker Hub along with partnerships with the Git repositories to help developers manage their tool chain.

Finally, Docker wants to help companies better manage open source, including licensing, updates and patches.

While the company has taken its focus off of enterprise in favor of aiming squarely at developers and developer teams, Johnston says that the company may find its way back to the enterprise again at some point—but with a SaaS approach this time. For now, the company will cater to the developer community and hope to build from there.

Docker had problems commercializing its technology prior to this as the container technology moved away from the container itself, which became a commodity of sorts, and moved towards management with Kubernetes.

Now the company is hoping to reinvent itself once again and rise from the chaos of last year to become a go-to, cloud-native developer tool vendor. Whether this approach can work is still unclear, but Johnston sees this as the way forward. Time will tell if the strategy is successful or not.

After selling enterprise biz, Docker lands $35M investment and new CEO

December 4, 2019

GitGuardian raises $12M to help developers write more secure code and ‘fix’GitHub leaks

Data breaches that could cause millions of dollars in potential damages have been the bane of the life of many a company. What’s required is a great deal of real-time monitoring. The problem is that this world has become incredibly complex. A SANS Institute survey found half of company data breaches were the result of account or credential hacking.

GitGuardian has attempted to address this with a highly developer-centric cybersecurity solution.

It’s now attracted the attention of major investors, to the tune of a $12 million in Series A funding, led by Balderton Capital . Scott Chacon, co-founder of GitHub, and Solomon Hykes, founder of Docker also participated in the round.

The startup plans to use the investment from Balderton Capital to expand its customer base, predominantly in the US. Around 75% of its clients are currently based in the US, with the remainder being based in Europe, and the funding will continue to drive this expansion.

Built to uncover sensitive company information hiding in online repositories, GitGuardian says its real-time monitoring platform can address the data leaks issues. Modern enterprise software developers have to integrate multiple internal and third-party services. That means they need incredibly sensitive “secrets”, such as login details, API keys, and private cryptographic keys used to protect confidential systems and data.

GitGuardian’s systems detect thousands of credential leaks per day. The team originally built its launch platform with public GitHub in mind, however, GitGuardian is built as a private solution to monitor and notify on secrets that are inappropriately disseminated in internal systems as well, such as private code repositories or messaging systems.

Solomon Hykes, founder of Docker and investor at GitGuardian, said: “Securing your systems starts with securing your software development process. GitGuardian understands this, and they have built a pragmatic solution to an acute security problem. Their credentials monitoring system is a must-have for any serious organization”.

Do they have any competitors?

Co-founder Jérémy Thomas told me: “We currently don’t have any direct competitors. This generally means that there’s no market, or the market is too small to be interesting. In our case, our fundraise proves we’ve put our hands on something huge. So the reason we don’t have competitors is because the problem we’re solving is counterintuitive at first sight. Ask any developer, they will say they would never hardcode any secret in public source code. However, humans make mistakes and when that happens, they can be extremely serious: it can take a single leaked credential to jeopardize an entire organization. To conclude, I’d say our real competitors so far are black hat hackers. Black hat activity is real on GitHub. For two years, we’ve been monitoring organized groups of hackers that exchange sensitive information they find on the platform. We are competing with them on speed of detection and scope of vulnerabilities covered.”

November 22, 2019

Direct mail still works if you avoid common mistakes

Julian Shapiro Contributor

Julian Shapiro is the founder of BellCurve.com, the growth marketing team that trains startups in advanced growth, helps you hire senior growth marketers, and finds you vetted growth agencies. He also writes at Julian.com.

Advertising in Discord/Telegram communities

Insights from Varun Mathure of Midnite

Discord/Telegram can be a great place to find engaged, niche communities for advertising. However, do not treat it like a typical ad channel. Community marketing is its own art, and there are many principles to doing it effectively. Here are just a few:

Treat Discord/Telegram users like you would Reddit users: they’ll reject being advertised to unless there’s legitimate, authentic value being provided.
Work with moderators to offer services that make their moderation duties easier. Perhaps a bot or tool that would be legitimately useful to the community while also organically pitching your startup.
Have a well-respected community member vouch for you — it goes a long way toward building trust with the rest of the community. Always start by building relationships.
Have a member of your team active in the community. Don’t just advertise; contribute regularly.
Run promos/incentives that encourage members to post your product screenshots or share your product output in the community. In other words, incentivize a frictionless way for community members to become your brand ambassadors.

Landing page tear-downs [Video]

Watch us critique landing pages. In the process, you’ll learn how to improve your own.

Most common direct mail mistakes

November 13, 2019

After selling enterprise biz, Docker lands $35M investment and new CEO

In what’s proving to be an interesting day for Docker, it announced it has received a $35 million investment from existing investors Benchmark Capital and Insight Partners.

It also announced the company has named long-time Chief Product Officer, Scott Johnston as CEO. Johnston is the third CEO at Docker this year, replacing Rob Bearden, who replaced Steve Singh after he stepped down in May.

Steve Singh stepping down as Docker CEO

The news came shortly after Mirantis had announced it had purchased Docker’s enterprise business. The moves are curious to say the least, but Johnston says that he still sees an opportunity for the company helping developers use Docker, the popular containerization engine that has struggled to find a business model.

“Specifically, we are investing in expanding our cloud services to enable developers to quickly discover technologies for use when building applications, to easily share these apps with teammates and the community, and to run apps frictionlessly on any Kubernetes endpoint, whether locally or in the cloud,” Johnston said in a statement.

Bearden said that the company decided to go in this direction after carefully studying its existing business models. “After conducting thorough analysis with the management team and the Board of Directors, we determined that Docker had two very distinct and different businesses: one an active developer business, and the other a growing enterprise business. We also found that the product and the financial models were vastly different. This led to the decision to restructure the company and separate the two businesses, which is the best thing for customers and to enable Docker’s industry-leading technology to thrive,” he said in a statement.

Prior to today’s announcement, the company had raised over $272 million, according to Crunchbase data. Now Benchmark and Insight are throwing it a $35 million lifeline to try one more time to build a successful business on top of the open source Docker project.

Mirantis acquires Docker Enterprise