Docker founder launches Dagger, a new DevOps platform

It has been nearly four years since Docker founder Solomon Hykes left the container technology company he founded.

Docker has had its ups and downs since Solomon Hykes left, including the sale of its enterprise business to Mirantis in 2019. But for a long time, as a spokesperson for Docker, Hykes has rarely been involved in the internal affairs of the enterprise, only participating in a few rounds of financing.

It is understood that Hykes has been quietly working on the startup Dagger, which launched a public beta yesterday and announced that it has completed a $20 million Series A financing.

This round of financing was led by Redpoint Ventures, Y Combinator, Nat Friedman (former CEO of GitHub), Brian Stevens (former CTO of Google Cloud, former CTO of Red Hat), Idit Levine (founder and CEO of solo.io), Julius Volz (Prometheus , Ellen Pao (former CEO of Reddit) and Daniel Lopez (co-founder of Bitnami) participated in the investment.

Previously, Dagger has completed two rounds of seed financing of $3 million and $7 million led by New Wave.

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Dagger was founded by Hykes along with his Docker friends Sam Alba and Andrea Luzzardi to build what's called a "DevOps operating system" for enterprise teams .

Hykes mentioned that a business can start with a team, not necessarily a product idea, just like Dagger. The co-founders had been thinking about what problems could be solved for the developer community and quickly realized that the DevOps process was still a bottleneck for many enterprise teams today.

" We decided to start from scratch and not make any assumptions about our own cognition," Hykes said of the team's mental journey. "We were like a blank sheet of paper during the exploration process, listening carefully to the opinions of the public. Feedback from the public. It also quickly pushed us in the direction of CI/CD and automated pipelines. DevOps was too complex as part of the transition between developers and operations teams, developers were clear about themselves, and they were productive. But operations teams want to rely on cool technologies like cloud services to scale their work. DevOps is like the glue between the two. It works, but the experience is too bad, and it wastes a lot of time and resources. So We're focused on that."

The Dagger team believes that there are many powerful DevOps tools on the market, but they are too specialized. And as the application gets bigger, the DevOps stack bloats with it.

"There's never been a shortage of dedicated, purpose-built tools, but developers have to glue them all together, and the glue is the bottleneck, so we're focused on replacing those glues with something better," says Hykes.

Specifically, this means Dagger helps DevOps engineers write their pipelines as a declarative model in CUE (ie, configure, unify, execute). From this, engineers can describe their pipelines in pure code and connect the pieces together.

Hykes explained, "The main difference with the new approach is that it's closer to the real software development experience . If you like the behavior someone wrote, you can just import it. If you want to see the source code for that operation, you can always check it out. This behavior itself can also be composed of multiple smaller and more targeted behaviors. This is highly unified with conventional software development ideas.”

To further improve the developer experience, the Dagger team is also building the "Dagger Universe", a curated library of toolkits that developers can import into their Dagger configuration.

Under such a holistic approach, potential users can also keep their existing CI infrastructure. Hykes said Dagger is not meant to replace the likes of Circle CI or GitLab, but to build on it.

Erica Brescia from Redpoint Ventures commented, "Infrastructure management and cloud software deployment are too complex for DevOps teams, but Dagger is an elegant way to simplify software supply chain management with code. … .. by making custom application delivery pipelines portable, the Dagger team has changed the game in terms of software building and deployment."

Hykes pointed out that he used a lot of Docker development experience in the process of building Dagger. Like Docker, Dagger also includes open source parts. While the team is still working on the details, it will be a key part of the Dagger ecosystem.

"Dagger is going to be a hybrid platform, so it needs to have an open source engine. This is the open source engine that we're announcing this time, paired with an optional cloud service that can be tightly integrated. ... We draw a conclusion from Docker , if you want to build a large and thriving developer community, you must truly embrace open source . However, if you want the community to thrive, and you want users to have a good experience, then you have to align the community with a clear product vision. get in touch."

Currently, the Dagger team will focus on developing open source engines, while paying attention to the needs and pain points of the community. Managed services will be available at a later date. Hykes said Docker was growing so fast that the service became the technology industry's foundational container technology solution almost overnight, causing the company to lose its way. So for Dagger, he plans to slow down . After all, Dagger itself does not directly run the application, and the team should be able to stay focused on it for a long time.

"In terms of commercialization, our thinking will also be slow and steady. When we were at Docker, we also hoped to stick to the project's positioning in commercial development, but we did not fully listen to the voices of community users," Hykes said. arrive.

Dagger will use the Series A funding to expand its development team, while hiring and building out marketing and developer relations teams.