Docker, the company behind the open source software container management platform of the same name, has raised $40 million in Series C funding, according to Gigaom.
The latest round of funding brings the total amount of money raised to $66 million. Some of the backers include Sequoia Capital as well as Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners, Insight Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Jerry Yang (News - Alert).
Docker allows developers to package applications into “containers” that they can move between different systems and have them work on different machines. For example, a developer working on Mac OS X can push an app to servers running Linux without having to worry about any dependencies the app needs.
If an app depends on a certain version of a library, it’s possible to install a container with that particular version, even if another version of the library is already installed. All of the components of a system won’t step on each other, making for more reliable applications. It’s a form of virtualization somewhere between running a native app and a full virtual system.
Docker founder and CTO Solomon Hykes likens these “Dockerized” applications to shipping containers. Just as workers in ports all around the world can handle shipping containers without knowing exactly what’s inside the same way, so can IT staff working on different systems do the same thing with software.
Docker has gained a lot of buzz in the Linux community, the biggest of which is in serving Web applications. Major users of Docker include eBay (News - Alert) and Mailgun. It has become a boon in increasingly complex server environments with large distributed server farms all running different software.
Package management systems have been common in the Linux world for quite a while, including the APT system used by the Debian and Ubuntu (News - Alert) distributions, but those are used for managing software installed on an individual system. Docker is geared toward moving applications between different systems.
True to the community-minded spirit of the open source movement, users has made over 13,000 “dockerized” applications available on the Docker Hub. The Hub offerings include major components like the MySQL database and the WordPress blogging software all the way to a base Ubuntu installation.