Docker 18.06 CE Debuts Alongside New Release Cadence

Docker Inc. is moving to a new release and support cadence for its non-enterprise Community Edition (CE) releases.

Docker CE Stable is moving to a twice-a-year release cadence staring with the Docker 18.09 release, which is set to debut in September. Docker CE was first announced by Docker in March 2017 as part of a new nomenclature and product approach. Docker had been releasing the CE version of its product on a quarterly basis.

While new Docker CE versions are set to debut every six months, Docker has pledged to support each new CE release for seven months.

While Docker CE Stable is moving to a longer release cycle, the Docker CE Edge release is now moving to faster cycle. Docker CE Edge editions were previously released on a monthly basis, but the Edge releases are now being replaced with a new Nightly build of Docker.

“Nightly builds are created once per day from the master branch.” Docker’s release documentation states. “These builds allow for testing from the latest code on the master branch. No qualifications or guarantees are made for the nightly build.”

Docker 18.06

Docker 18.06 CE is the last release to get a four-month release cycle and benefits from a long list of new features. Upstream development for Docker CE is done in the open-source Moby project, which in turn is used to help build Docker CE releases.

Among the noteworthy capabilities in Docker 18.06 CE is the ability to enable a user to specify default address pools for Docker networks.

“When a user creates a network without specifying a –subnet, docker will pick a subnet for the network from the static set 172.[17-31].0.0/16 and 192.168.[0-240].0/20 for the local scope networks and from the static set 10.[0-255].[0-255].0/24 for the global scope networks,” the git pull request for the feature states. “For different reasons, several users have asked to be able to control these defaults.”

Docker 18.06 CE is also used to help power the Docker Desktop for macOS and Windows, which now gets the full Kubernetes system. The CE Edge edition of Docker Desktop had provided Kubernetes support since January.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at ServerWatch and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.