Docker And JFrog Partnership: Path To Limitless DevOps in the Cloud

The whole DevOps world works involving containers in building, packaging, running and shipping their software applications. While Docker is a giant and pioneered this technology of containerization, they thought to add some limits to the anonymous and free account holders to free up the space accumulated by inactive images and provide premium support to the paying ones. While this was met with mixed reactions, some were sad and some happy. 

Below are some examples of tweets from developers who felt sad.

Source: Twitter

Source: Twitter

Source: Twitter

Source: Twitter

And below are some examples of tweets from developers who have more recently felt happy about their Docker usage, following industry announcements.

Source: Twitter

Source: Twitter

Source: Twitter

Accelerating DevOps

At a strategic level, each and every company on earth desires to respond to their customers' ongoing demands and make them a high priority. Believe it or not, every company these days is a software company, and hence we are all connected to software in one or another. From grocery shopping to the watches we wear, everything runs on software. This software innovation has led many companies to embrace DevOps at a tactical level to tackle and cope with the speed of software innovation.

Who doesn't love containers? The dream of working the code seamlessly in any environment was made possible by Docker. Developers love Docker, and there is a massive community around the world around it. To a certain extent, we all agree that winning in DevOps was made possible by technologies like containerization by Docker and orchestration by Kubernetes. 

To win in DevOps, you need certain tools for version control, CI/CD, storing artifacts, scanning the artifacts, security, monitoring, etc. You may find some best in class DevOps tools scattered around that you would like to combine as one and use to build your DevOps toolchain. 

The image below shows different tools to accelerate your DevOps lifecycle management.

Now, how about these two best in class DevOps companies coming together to give a great DevOps and developer experience? Yes, to make this developer dream possible, Docker and JFrog have partnered together. 

The news has become official now, JFrog and Docker, Inc partnership has given a new hope to the developer community to build containerized applications efficiently without being worried about the limits and hence can focus on creating better software for the customers.

Some months back, Docker was in the news for two reasons: Image retention limits and download throttling that gave some severe headaches to the developers working on containerized applications. 

These two - Image retention and download throttling policies stated, 

• Image retention limits: A six-month image retention policy was imposed but then the new update came from their official website, stating that they are pausing enforcement of the changes to image retention until mid-2021.
• Download throttling: Anonymous users: Download rate limit of 100 pulls per six hours free accounts: 200 pulls per six hours

Even though these limits were imposed, the companies started coming up with their own hacks to work around these limits and encouraged their customers to use such hacks. But, to be frank, none of the solutions were sophisticated enough to get things done. But now, this news should bring some happiness to the faces of such people who use Docker enormously in their day to day work. What's the news? We will cover it in the coming paragraph of this article. Stay tuned!

What does this partnership bring to the DevOps world?

As per the official press release, this partnership provides developers and DevOps enthusiasts using JFrog Cloud with unlimited, high-performant access to Docker Hub and to Docker Official Images to simplify cloud-native application development.

The partnership delivers:

1. Exclusive access to trusted, high-quality content in Docker Hub, including Docker Official Images and content from Docker Verified Publishers. 
2. An industry-best developer experience for building, sharing, and delivering cloud-native applications.
3. Dedicated channels to support mutual customers.
4. A proven solution used by top Fortune 1000 organizations, ensuring enterprise-grade reliability and performance to meet the requirements of large organizations modernizing their applications with containers, streamlining cloud-native application delivery in the enterprise.
5. A foundation for future collaboration between the companies to make developers’ journeys more joyful. 

If you are looking for a solution to get around the Docker Hub limits and smoothen your development workflow without worrying about the image pull limits, JFrog encourages developers to sign up for a free subscription on their site.

How this helps the Developer and DevOps community

This partnership aims to ensure that developers can build, share, and run apps with confidence. Making sure the developers get the images they want and access them from whatever development process they are using from a centralized platform. The partnership removes the image retention and throttling limits for the developers/companies that get in through Docker Subscription and Docker Hub Official Images in the Artifactory SaaS and on-premise environments. 

This integration across Docker Hub and Artifactory boosts the premier, trusted, and high-quality access to the Docker Official Images in Docker Hub and secure access to images in Artifactory. It removes most developers' headaches of searching and maintaining secure images from trusted sources and streamlines the application development workflows.

Build software with confidence

Image source: Docker

As shown in this illustration architecture, developers can build apps with various image sources - from Docker Official Images, from popular OSS projects, from Docker Hub, from software companies. As images are requested, they get cached into JFrog's Artifactory, and this is where the images can be enriched and managed by corporate policies, cached for high performance, and mirrored across an organization’s infrastructure. On top of this, the images in Artifactory can get the advantage of other features that come under the JFrog suite that includes Xray's vulnerability scanning, CI/CD pipelines, policies, and more. All this will be without any restrictions or limits.

From now on, with JFrog, you can get unlimited pulls from the Docker Hub out of the box without any further configurations. JFrog customers are automatically excluded from Docker Hub’s image throttling limits and will be able to enjoy endless support and access to Docker Hub.

More power to developers

Image source: JFrog

Through limitless Docker Hub access coupled with JFrog Artifactory acting as a local container cache, there are various benefits companies can reap. It lifts the developer productivity by providing faster and limitless access to images, with enhanced security by leveraging JFrog Xray, the ultimate vulnerability scanning tool that helps developers by continuously scanning the images they pull from Docker Hub allowing a shift-left approach in the development workflow. 

This is how the partnership differentiates

Developers and enterprises can instantly take this collaborative advantage with any of JFrog's SaaS subscriptions - including the free subscription - across cloud providers. For more information about the JFrog and Docker partnership, read this blog post by JFrog and this blog post by Docker.  

Disclosure: I am a JFrog employee, but I objectively think this is great news for the whole DevOps industry!

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay 

Also published at https://dzone.com/articles/docker-hub-rate-limits-to-limitless-devops-in-the