Docker has released Docker Desktop 4.21. This version brings Docker Builds beta, support for new wasm runtimes, Docker Init support for Rust, Docker Scout dashboard enhancements, and more.
Docker Init Beta, which was released in Docker 4.18, is a CLI designed to make it easy to add Docker resources to any project by creating the required assets for the projects. Docker 4.19 added support for Python and Node.js, and now in Docker 4.21, support has been added for Rust. Go is also supported. To create the assets automatically, it is only necessary to run the command docker init in a project. This will automatically create the dockerfiles, compose, and .dockerignore files, based on the characteristics of the project.
Docker Scout is a Docker product in early access designed to help to address security issues in images. This allows users to see all image data from local and remote images from both Docker Hub and Artifactory without leaving Docker Desktop. Initially released in Docker 4.19, it now brings dashboard enhancements that enable sharing of image analysis with team members in an organization. The primary goal is to help team members in security, compliance, and operations to identify vulnerabilities and issues in images.
Docker Desktop for macOS has received network, filesystem, and memory performance improvements. According to Docker, the container-to-host networking is 5x faster. This has been achieved by replacing vpnkit with the TCP/IP stack from the gVisor project. This improvement can be noticed in scenarios where containers communicate with servers outside of the Docker network, such as workloads that download packages from the internet via npm install or apt-get.
Launching Docker Desktop is at least 25% quicker on Apple Silicon Macs compared with previous versions. VirtioFS is the default now on macOS 12.5+, which brings substantial performance gains when sharing host files with containers (e.g. docker run -v). This gain can be noticed when building the Redis engine, where the time dropped from 7 minutes to 2 minutes.
Docker Compose v1 has reached end of life (EOL) and will no longer be bundled with Docker Desktop after June 2023. A warning is shown in the terminal when running Compose v1 commands. For users who want to suppress this message, just set the environment variable COMPOSE_V1_EOL_SILENT=1.
Docker Builds view beta is a simple interface designed to give users visibility of active builds currently running in the system, enabling the analysis and debugging of completed builds. Every build started with docker build or docker buildx build will automatically appear in the Builds view. From there, it is possible to inspect the properties of a build invocation, including timing information, build cache usage, Dockerfile source, log access, etc.
The following Wasm runtimes are now supported in Docker Desktop: Slight, Spin, and Wasmtime. These runtimes can be downloaded on demand when the containerd image store is enabled.
More details about the news of the Docker Desktop can be found in the release notes.