Chief Technology Officer, Docker, Inc.
Search every verified Justin Cormack interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Justin Cormack, Chief Technology Officer at Docker, has been active in public discussions about the container ecosystem and related technologies. In a talk marking a decade in the industry, he reflected on containers' impact on DevOps, noting that while they made some practices "boring" and improved reproducibility, he described the microservices trend as "a terrible idea" that went "a bit overboard." He also cited a 2024 Datadog report indicating that idle resources account for a substantial share of container costs. Cormack has also promoted the use of object storage as a persistence layer for applications, calling it "one of the most exciting kind of areas in Cloud native right now," and has discussed Docker's work on WebAssembly (Wasm) support. He has said Docker is committed to being "runtime neutral" and to helping developers use Wasm alongside containers. Additionally, he has spoken about the company's focus on developer experience and security, including its involvement in the Notary v2 project for container image signing and supply chain security. In interviews, Cormack has described Docker's earlier business struggles and its later pivot to serve individual developers, saying the company is "developer-obsessed" and that this focus has contributed to its growth.
After a decade in the container ecosystem, I look at what did containers do for us in devops? What went well, what did they help, and what did they hinder? If we hadn’t had containers would we have been forced to invent them, or could we have got by, or been better off without them? I will use my inside view from the last ten years to explore what could have been and how we got here, and what this means for the future in devops.
Object Storage Is All You Need - Justin Cormack, Docker When Jeff Bezos commissioned Amazon S3 he called it "malloc for the web"; since then many people have considered cloud object storage to be a weird kind of non Posix filesystem, but also a great backing store for websites or storing lots of data. Recently more and more applications are being built with object storage as the entire persistence layer. This started with analytics databases such as Snowflake and Databricks, and the open source Delta Lake and Apache Iceberg projects. More recently the use is spreading to even more application…
The evolution of Docker is a story of open-source innovation, business pivots, and continued focus on developer experience. In this episode of Nerding Out with Viktor, Viktor Petersson sits down with Justin Cormack, CTO of Docker, to unpack how Docker grew from a container pioneer to a modern DevOps essential. They discuss Docker’s early days, its dramatic 2019 pivot, and the company’s current investments in developer tooling, security, and WebAssembly (Wasm). From Docker Scout and SBOMs to Docker Hub infrastructure and the future of containerization, this conversation covers both the technic…
Keynote: New Advances for Cross-platform AI Applications in Docker - Michael Yuan, Maintainer, CNCF WasmEdge and CEO, Second State & Justin Cormack, Chief Technology Officer, Docker, Inc We will discuss new ways to support cross-platform GPU / AI workloads in container ecosystems, specifically with Docker’s support for the WebGPU standard. WebGPU allows container applications to access the host GPUs and other AI accelerators through a portable API. There is no more need to build Docker images for GPU vendors and their proprietary drivers. We will demonstrate how the WasmEdge project builds on…
When Docker restructured, we returned to our roots: super-serving developers. CTO Justin Cormack says that’s why the company is developer-obsessed, not customer-obsessed: “We really wanted to focus on the fact that it's the developer who loves Docker. It's the developer who is going to be using Docker every day…” Over the past decade, Docker exploded in popularity as companies moved to cloud and adopted software containers as they did... but the company struggled as as a business and, five years ago, made massive changes: “When we restructured people were like, `Well, I kind of hope this work…
Explore the ever-evolving world of collaboration in software development with Justin Cormack, CTO of Docker. In this GitKon 2023 Keynote session, you will: • Uncover the historical milestones that have shaped developer collaboration. • Learn the key tools and practices that are fueling modern development. • Get insights on the role of the developer community in driving meaningful innovation in the industry. See more of GitKon 2023 on-demand here: • GitKon 2023 Day 1: Legendary, Free Online ... Subscribe to our channel to stay updated on exciting and educational developer-focused conten…
Sanjeev Mohan, Principal, SanjMo , Matt Butcher, Fermyon and Justin Cormack, Docker sits down with John Furrier for KubeCon CloudNativeCon EU 2023 in Amsterdam the Netherlands.
Matt Butcher, Fermyon; Justin Cormack, Docker, sits down with Savannah Peterson, and John Furrier for KubeCon CloudNativeCon EU 2023 in Amsterdam the Netherlands.
Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from April 17-21, 2023. Learn more at https://kubecon.io The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects. Notary: State Of Development - Justin Cormack, Docker Speakers: Justin Cormack This talk gives an overview of the status of the Notary project, and the Notary v2 work, and the context in the broader ecosystem. Supply chain security is becoming increasingly critical and its importance h…
Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from April 17-21. Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects. Keynote: Wasm: A Revolution for Browsers, Containers, and the Cloud - Justin Cormack, Chief Technology Officer, Docker Wasm has had quite an impact in the browser world, but if you’re here you've probably also seen the 2019 Solomon Hykes tweet: "If WASM+WASI existed in 2008, we wouldn'…
Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming hybrid event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022 from October 24-28 in Detroit (and online!). Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects. Notary v2: Deep Dive and Open Issues - Justin Cormack, Docker & Steve Lasker, Microsoft Notary v2 is a community project to solve the issues that the existing Notary project has that have hindered widespread adoption. The project is a community initiative with the main regist…
Docker CTO Justin Cormack joins Rob Zuber to discuss how Docker moved from very few paid users among millions of others to their current level of success. In this episode, Cormack shares the paths Docker took to transform its massive user base into a sustainable business model. Hint: sometimes product-market fit might be right in front of you. Have a topic you want to discuss? Reach out to us on Twitter @circleci!
“I looked up the 2024 Datadog report to see on the state of cloud costs and it told me that 83% of container costs are associated with idle resources. So what's happened in 10 years is we've gone from about 15% of capacity was used in VMs to now we know exactly 17% of capacity is used because we've got way better monitoring and so we have much more accurate numbers that tell us that the situation is exactly the same a”
“I think containers really helped people to some extent with this whole thing about like let's build our applications out of components that are open source and like 95% of the content of everyone's applications is now open source components that are great because they're good quality. Um they might have CVEs in them sometimes or whatever, but they and yeah, less problems about maintenance, but they're better than the”
“I think object storage is actually one of the most exciting kind of areas in Cloud native right now. It's a key value store with an HTTP API, you can store things up to typically about 5 terabytes or so, and it's not a file system, you can only update objects all at once, so it's very restrictive. But that's because the kind of capabilities and design requirements are very, very, very... there are 11 nines in that du”
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