DockerCon 2020: And … That’s a Wrap

DockerCon LIVE 2020 is a wrap, and you rocked it! Our first-ever virtual swing at the traditionally in-person event was a winner on so many levels.

One of our goals was to extend our reach to all developers and members of the community by making the conference digital and free of charge. Mission accomplished! A grand total of 78,000 folks signed up for the May 28 one-day online event.

You hailed from 193 countries (by some counts there are only 196 countries on the planet!). That includes far-flung places like Madagascar, Zimbabwe, and even the Maldives. Heck, you even joined us from the Vatican City State (pop. about 800).

Whether you were a seasoned developer or just starting out, our content game was strong. Best practices, how-tos, new product features and use cases, technical deep dives, open source projects—you name it, it was on the menu.

One of our key challenges was replicating the interactivity and spontaneity of in-person events in a virtual setting, but our efforts paid off. We made sure speakers and interviewees were available for live Q&A for their whole session to engage with attendees, resulting in over 21K chats. And remember those popular Hallway Tracks hosted by Captains at past DockerCons? We did our best to virtualize those with Captains On Deck, one of the three co-streaming channels where rotating Docker Captains were there for folks to hang out, talk shop, and get questions answered in real time.

Here are some of the event highlights:

• In his keynote, Docker For Developers Now More Than Ever, CEO Scott Johnston wasted zero time showing (not just telling) how cool new Docker features help dev teams build apps and get them post-haste from code to cloud. (Watch it here)

• RedMonk co-founder and industry analyst James Governor gave a sweeping overview of how far open source and distributed computing have come in his keynote: Open Source and Developer Culture: History, Future and Distributed Work. (Watch it here)

• Lukonde Mwila of Entelect dove into how software engineers can dockerize multi-container applications and deploy them to the cloud. (Watch it here)

• Docker’s Peter McKee walked acolytes through how to get started with Docker, including installing Docker and Kubernetes, building our first images, running our images locally, and more. (Watch it here)

• Top Rated Docker Use Case Sessions: 
  
  • Using Docker Hub at Scale to Support Micro Focus’s Delivery and Deployment Model – Patrick Deloulay, Micro Focus
    
  • Predicting Space Weather with Docker – Chris Lauer, NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center
    
  • Dockerizing Health: Helping Us Treat Childhood Cancer – Children’s Cancer Institute
    

• Top Rated Technical Sessions: 
  
  • How to Get Started with Docker – Peter McKee, Docker
    
  • Simplify All the Things with Docker Compose – Michael Irwin, Virginia Tech
    
  • Hands-on Helm – Jessica Deen, Microsoft
    
  • Become a Power User with Microsoft Visual Studio Code – Brian Christner, 56K + Docker Captain
    
  • Build & Deploy Multi-Container Applications to AWS – Lukonde Mwila, Entelect

Let’s not forget all the insightful interviews and panel discussions presented by theCube from Docker experts and organizations including National Institutes of Health, Children’s Cancer Institute, Microsoft, AWS, Snyk, Google, Cockroach Labs, NGNIX and Redmonk.

Thank you for helping make DockerCon LIVE a spectacular experience for us all. We learned a ton and we’ll be using it all to make the next one even better! If you missed a session, you can see all the conference sessions here.