About Us

Since we started in early 2015 our mission was to make container technology a first class citizen on ARM and IoT devices. Then and now Docker was the dominant container technology so it made sense to concentrate on Docker.

We called ourselves the “Docker Pirates” to express our rebellious and anti-establishment attitude. As the establishment was only concerned with Docker on big server we went the opposite direction and asked ourselves how to use container technology on really small devices. We believe that Docker can be even more useful on small devices than on big servers.

HypriotOS

The most popular and affordable small ARM device in 2014 was the Raspberry Pi which was sold more than 5 million times.

In early 2015 there was no easy and approachable way to run Docker on the Raspberry Pi or any other ARM device. So our first task was to change exactly that.

In February 2015 we brought out the first version of HypriotOS, which is a minimal Debian-based operating systems that is optimized to run Docker. It made it dead easy use Docker on any Raspberry Pi by just downloading and flashing a prepared SD card image with HypriotOS. From start to finish it takes a user less than 5 minutes to get started with Docker on Raspberry Pi.

The most prominent features of HypriotOS are

• minimal Debian-based operating system - most people know how to use Debian & Ubuntu based distros
• optimized for Docker awesomeness - from optimized and tuned Linux kernel settings to the included fileystems everything is aligned to make Docker run very well
• up-to-date Docker versions - often we are only mere seconds behind the officially published upstream versions
• really easy to use - download, flash and boot - that’s all you need to get started

Docker Tools & Ecosystem

In the course of 2015 we not only delivered regular updates for HypriotOS, but we also started to make other components of the Docker ecosystem available on the Raspberry Pi. So out-of-the-box people could start using Docker-Swarm, Docker-Compose and even Docker-Machine.

This made HypriotOS the perfect playground for Docker on ARM.

Docker and HypriotOS on other devices

In late 2015 we started to bring Docker to many more 32 and 64 Bit ARM devices. HypriotOS now has not only support for the Raspberry Pi 1, 2 & 3, but also for a range of ODroid devices. Support for devices like the Banana Pi, Beagle Bone, Nvidia Shield and the Pine A64 are in the making.

Spreading the word

We contribute to Docker and share our knowlegde by blogging, giving talks and organizing workshops about Docker, ARM and IoT. We are also the organizers of the Docker Usergroup in Bamberg.