Docker Inc. raised $105 million in an oversubscribed Series C funding round that "gives us the juice to step on the gas" and expand both product development and the vendor's geographical footprint, CEO Scott Johnson told SDxCentral.

"Developers are hungry for additional productivity, and their managers are hungry to see those developers productive with additional security built into those applications," Johnson explained, adding that this trend will drive Docker's allocation of its additional capital.

With these investments, Docker plans to build a tool that gives developers a consistent view and integration process of applications in the cloud-native ecosystem. At the same time, this tool will allow ecosystem partners to extend Docker's functionality across their own services "in a way that's friendly to developers and easy for them to consume and access," Johnson said.

"You can imagine one-click extensibility that allows a new feature functionality to be presented to the developer in a natural, very integrated fashion," he added.

Docker also hopes to use this funding to explore ways of simplifying the development process of Kubernetes-destined applications. "Kubernetes has taken over the world from an orchestration standpoint on the server side, and yet it still is pretty complex for developers to build applications that are deployed to Kubernetes," Johnson explained.

The vendor currently ships Kubernetes inside Docker Desktop to give developers a local experience of developing a product against that orchestrator, but there's more Docker can do together with the ecosystem, Johnson said.

"We've been steadily and consistently shipping product to developers, updating our go to market, updating our packaging and pricing to make it developer-friendly," and through that lens, this funding represents outside acknowledgement of Docker's heightened developer focus, Johnson said.

"The investments we've made over these two and a half years [are] starting to show results that are obviously favorable, such that investors feel confident giving us additional capital to continue this journey," he explained.

Johnson also touted Docker's underlying support of emerging technologies like serverless computing. All the major cloud providers' serverless platforms — Google Cloud Functions, Microsoft Azure Functions, and Amazon Web Services Lambda — "use that Docker container format under the covers as their unit of compute for serverless," Johnson said.

And that works just fine once the serverless code is deployed to the cloud, but developers want to be able to edit, create, update, and test that functionality before code is pushed to the cloud.

"Docker's role in that is to provide a local environment where the developers use their IDE, their text editor, to create code for a serverless function [and] test it locally using Docker," he said.

Once developers are happy with the code in Docker's test environment, they can deploy it to the cloud function of their choosing. This points to Docker's focus on "creating great developer experiences locally that complement the deployment targets of our cloud partners," Johnson said.

The latest funding also strongly propelled Docker back into unicorn territory. The vendor said the funding round pushed its valuation north of $2 billion, having already picked up $58 million across two previous funding rounds since a substantial re-organization in late 2019.