Developers are struggling with the complexity of pipelines because every pipeline and product is different. In this video, Solomon Hykes, creator of Docker and Dagger, talks about the challenges developers are facing with pipeline complexity and how Dagger is helping solve these problems. He says, “The reason CI/CD is so hard to solve is because you can’t solve it once and for all with a well-defined product. Because everyone’s pipeline is different.”

Containerization, Kubernetes, and developer experience

• Hykes discusses what led him to create Docker and now Dagger. He explains that while many problems were solved with Docker, deploying applications to the cloud is still challenging for developers.
• Hykes explains that Docker laid the foundation for architecting applications and deploying them to the cloud around the idea of containers and Dagger is a continuation of it.
• Over the past few years, there has been a focus on running more containers more effectively in the data center but developers are still grappling with pipeline complexity.

CI/CD challenges and solutions

• Dagger helps solve pipeline complexity, benefiting both developers building the app and infrastructure teams running it in production.
• Hykes believes that CI/CD is not a solved problem and that current solutions are stuck in a narrow category of CI/CD, making it difficult to solve the broader problem of application delivery.
• Hykes explains that CI/CD is so difficult to solve because everyone’s pipeline and their product are different. He feels that the way to solve it is with a modular system that makes it easy to assemble your own pipeline.

Containerizing and modularizing CI pipelines for faster development and security

• Dagger provides a modular system for assembling pipelines, transforming shell scripts and YAML files into code, and running the code in containers. Hykes discusses how containerizing the pipeline makes it portable.
• Dagger improves supply chain security because once you have turned your pipelines into code and are running the code in containers developers can be more agile, helping to adapt to new threats quicker.
• Hykes highlights how containerizing the pipelines helps developers secure them, scale them, move faster, and optimize the pipeline.

Building a successful open-source project and company

• Dagger breaks down the problem into simple-to-program small units and then the functions are connected together into a pipeline.
• Hykes discusses the growing community around Dagger and his goals to create a software ecosystem that helps solve a universal problem all software teams have.
• Hykes stresses the importance of building great commercial products on top of successful open source projects and the lessons he has learned from Docker.

Dagger, a tool for improving software development pipelines, and its integration with AI

• Hykes discusses how pipelines are more than just CI, telling us how Dagger is being used to improve different pipelines such as AI and data ones.
• Many developers are incorporating AI into their applications. Dagger is being used to re-engineer pipelines that have AI components and Dagger functions are being integrated with OpenAI with GPT scripts.
• Hykes discusses the potential for the ecosystem of Dagger functions to become available to AI agents.

Guest: Solomon Hykes (LinkedIn)
Company: Dagger (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.