DEVOPSdigest

Docker announced a major expansion of its AI initiative with the upcoming Docker MCP Catalog and Docker MCP Toolkit.

Built around the emerging Model Context Protocol (MCP), these new offerings bring Docker’s signature developer experience to the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem.

The Docker MCP Catalog, integrated into Docker Hub, provides developers a centralized way to discover verified and curated MCP tools. The Docker MCP Toolkit enables developers to run, authenticate, and manage MCP tools with the simplicity, security, and usability they expect from Docker. Paired with new enterprise-ready tooling, the initiative helps developers put AI to work without reinventing their workflow.

“Building functional AI applications shouldn’t feel radically different from building any other app,” said Docker President and COO Mark Cavage. “Developers want to integrate AI into their existing workflows–build locally, test, and ship to production with confidence. With agentic tools starting to behave like full-fledged software systems, the old challenges of packaging, versioning, and authentication come back fast. The Docker MCP Catalog brings that all together in one place, a trusted, developer-friendly experience within Docker Hub, where tools are verified, secure, and easy to run.”

Docker is partnering with some of the most trusted names in cloud, developer tooling, and AI — including Elastic, Heroku at Salesforce, New Relic, Stripe and many more — to shape a secure, developer-first ecosystem for MCP tools. From Docker Desktop to leading MCP clients like Docker AI Agent, Claude, continue.dev, Cursor, Goose, VS Code, and Windsurf, integrating powerful and capable AI agents into real workflows is about to get a whole lot easier.

Developers can discover and run 100+ MCP servers directly from the Docker Desktop extension. These servers will also be hosted on Docker Hub, complete with verified instructions for running them with any MCP client. It’s all part of our mission to make building with AI as simple, secure, and familiar as any other app workflow.

With a growing ecosystem of trusted, verified MCP servers and clients, Docker is delivering the security, consistency, and scalability enterprises need to confidently use AI-powered tools.

“Docker’s new MCP Catalog is a meaningful step forward in secure software delivery,” said Paul Nashawaty, Practice Lead and Principal Analyst at theCUBE Research. “With features like Registry Access Management and built-in secret management, Docker is addressing the growing enterprise demand for supply chain security. That demand is expected to reach 70 percent adoption by 2026, up from just 10 percent in 2022. At the same time, its AI tooling, including Docker Model Runner and Docker AI Agent, simplifies how developers build and run models locally. This is critical in a market where global AI software spend is projected to exceed 300 billion dollars by 2026. Docker is positioning itself at the intersection of containerization and AI, where speed, consistency, and security are essential.”

Docker MCP Catalog is built on the scale and reliability of Docker Hub, a container registry with over 14 million images and millions of developers. Future releases will enable teams to publish and manage their own MCP servers with full enterprise controls, including Registry Access Management (RAM) and Image Access Management (IAM), plus seamless secret storage integrated into Docker Desktop.