Mirantis, a Cloud consulting company focused on Kubernetes and OpenStack, has acquired Docker Enterprise. While Mirantis will focus on the enterprise segment, the part of Docker which is not being acquired will return to the company's original goal of improving developers' workflows.
The agreement covers almost the entire Docker product lineup, including the Docker Container Engine, Docker Trusted Registry, and Docker Kubernetes Service, as well as hundreds of Docker developers.
Mirantis and the newly acquired Docker Enterprise team will continue to develop and support the Docker Enterprise platform and add new capabilities that enterprise clients expect.
Mirantis will focus on delivering Kubernetes/Docker as a service to make the adoption of containerized applications as easy as possible for enterprise customers, says CEO Adrian Ionel. Ionel also clarifies Mirantis considers Kubernetes as its primary orchestrator and will evaluate solutions to make the transition from Swarm to Kubernetes easier for existing users. This hints at the demise of Docker Swarm, which Mirantis will continue to support for at least two years, though.
As mentioned, Docker will go back to its original aim of improving developers' workflows and focus on Docker for Desktop and Docker Hub, which are the fundamental tools that allow developers to build, ship, and share their apps in a portable way on a variety of servers.
Docker and our community ecosystem have the opportunity to extend the open standards, functionality, automation tooling and cloud services of Docker Desktop and Docker Hub to better help developers build, share and run modern apps [...] Docker will continue to expand the functionality of our open source frameworks and developer productivity tools like Docker Compose, Docker Apps and Docker App Templates.
As a first consequence of the restructuring of its business, Docker has secured new investments of $35 million to keep building its vision.
After some misunderstandings due to the late announcement of the $35 million investment in Docker proper were cleared up, reactions from the developers community focused on assessing the relative merits of two separate and distinctive souls Docker had: on the one hand, the company was behind the creation of great technology that changed the way developers work; on the other, Docker was a company trying to build a business model on top of that by selling enterprises products and competing directly with the likes of Red Hat, VMware, and the large public cloud providers.
According to several comments, the second part of the story was the one that did not have success. Some still expressed their concerns, though, about the business model that should enable Docker to succeed as a company developing tools for developers, in a scenario where other container technologies, such as podman, are gaining momentum.