Building Momentum: 2024 Highlights and What’s Ahead in 2025

2024 was a big year for Dagger, we made significant strides on our mission: delivering one integrated platform to orchestrate the delivery of applications to the cloud, from start to finish. Solomon presented his vision in keynotes all over the world - that the world’s software factories need a major overhaul. Technical debt, and slow, inflexible, script-based build and CI systems are significantly slowing down productivity; there must be a better way to develop software! With every software package and every developer being impacted in some way by AI, the need to tackle our technical debt and modernize our systems has never been more important. We need to make our pipelines programmable and provide the right primitives for both humans and future AI agents.

To that end, we shipped ground breaking capabilities, improved the developer experience, and made big strides in Dagger’s performance and reliability. We’re proud of what we’ve delivered, but even more proud of what we’ve seen our community contribute - from new and improved SDKs, impactful modules, demos and POCs, and so much more. With the new year upon us, we wanted to reflect on all the great things that happened in 2024 and express our gratitude to all those who contributed to this amazing journey.

The Technology

1. Dagger Modules & Functions & the Daggerverse

One of our fundamental beliefs is that CI must be programmable and API-first. Delivering modules was a major step in that direction. With modules we introduced the concept of reusable, composable functions for pipelines, transforming the way workflows are built, shared, and maintained, and laying the foundation for a modular, scalable CI/CD ecosystem. We've received a lot of great feedback about how modules enabled greater interoperability for teams using Dagger, by providing a standardized way to package and share reusable workflows, making it easy for them to integrate diverse tools and technologies. 

Soon after, we launched the Daggerverse, a searchable, community-driven library of reusable Dagger Functions, empowering developers to build pipelines faster and collaborate on shared components. Our community went into overdrive, building hundreds of modules, and the best 10 have earned the coveted featured tag. You may want to check out some of the featured modules, such as the  K3s, Helm, GHA, or Go modules, and see examples of how to use them generated for each major language. 

Learn more: 

• Blog posts announcing modules and the Daggerverse

• Check out community modules in the Daggerverse: https://daggerverse.dev/ 

• Learn about modules in the Dagger Docs: https://docs.dagger.io/features/modules 

2. Interactive Debugging

One of the most talked about capabilities we added to Dagger was the ability to debug your pipelines interactively, opening a terminal at the point of failure. The “-i” feature quickly became indispensable to everyone using Dagger and a constant source of “oohs” and “aahs” as community members demo’d Dagger to their friends and colleagues. 

Learn more:

• Overview of interactive mode in the 0.12 launch blog: https://dagger.io/blog/dagger-0-12 or Dagger Documentation: https://docs.dagger.io/features/debugging 

• Dagger cofounder Andrea Luzzardi demo’s Dagger Debugging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOVYdHDoocQ

3. Traces and Pipeline Visibility

Since we’re on the theme of debugging pipelines... Early 2024 we made a big effort to refactor Dagger to be OTel based. This enabled us to deliver rich visibility into pipelines, adding traces to our Dagger Cloud SaaS offering. We decided to make Dagger Cloud free for individuals and very cheap for small teams of less than 10 users and saw amazing adoption of Dagger Cloud by the community. We also added the ability for anyone to look at traces for Daggerized Open Source projects, making it super easy for contributors to collaborate and troubleshoot.

Learn more: 

• Traces in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H35LwLuqPyE

• Public Traces launch blog: https://dagger.io/blog/public-traces 

4. Enterprise-readiness

We’ve seen huge interest from companies large and small in Dagger in 2024. Recognizing the unique needs of our enterprise users, we invested in SOC2 certification, and delivered critical enterprise-ready features, such as enterprise network support (proxies and CAs), private modules, and Git credential helpers, enabling organizations to safely manage private dependencies and repositories.

5. Performance, Usability, and Reliability

This year, we made significant investments in user and developer experience. On the performance front, we introduced faster file synchronization by optimizing caching and eliminating redundant data transfers, reducing build times and making workflows more efficient. We also added advanced metrics tracking for network, memory, and CPU usage, giving developers powerful insights to optimize their pipelines and identify bottlenecks. On reliability, we tackled issues like goroutine leaks and deadlocks, ensuring stable pipeline execution. We addressed cache volume mounting inconsistencies in debug containers and improved handling of edge cases, like null arguments, to deliver more predictable results. On the usability side, developers now benefit from clearer error messages, actionable suggestions, and better defaults in APIs like the AsService command behavior. These upgrades collectively enhance productivity and reduce friction, making Dagger pipelines faster, more reliable, and easier to work with than ever before.

Learn more:

• 0.12 Release: Interactive debugging, reliability and performance, compat mode, corporate networks

• 0.13 Release: First-class monorepo support, private modules, a new CLI command

• 0.14 Release: Git credential helpers, exit code API, OCI annotations

• 0.15 Release: Better errors, Faster filesync, Metrics

The Community

We at Dagger have a high degree of commitment to investing in the community first, to developing in the open, and engaging deeply with a broad set of users, with the idea that our community will spread our message far more scalably than we ever could alone. We are so grateful to the hundreds of people who have not only engaged deeply with us but worked hard to make Dagger better.

1. SDKs

One of the most talked about Dagger capabilities is the ability to work across programming languages, writing your modules and pipelines in the language used by an organization’s developers. Of course, it’s a challenge to support so many languages, and we’ve been encouraged by the efforts of our community to build ever more SDKs. As of today we have 9 SDKs, many of which were contributed and continue to be maintained by the broader community, including PHP, Rust, Elixir, .Net and Java, with more on the way. We are humbled by these contributions. In 2025 we hope to work with our community to continue to deepen and extend our SDKs and build stronger bridges to new communities. 

Learn more:

• Dagger SDKs overview in Dagger Documentation: https://docs.dagger.io/api/sdk/ 

• Dagger SDKs themselves on Github: https://github.com/dagger/dagger/tree/main/sdk 

2. Users and Champions

It’s been amazing to see members of our community go from newbies to power-users, trying Dagger, Daggerizing their pipelines and evangelizing the Dagger vision to others. Twice a month our users have joined the Dagger Community Call to showcase their efforts, creating a virtuous cycle as each of us learns from each other’s efforts and experiences. 

Here are a few highlights: 

• A number of Open Source projects Daggerized - take a look at their stories and pipelines here. 

• Users shared with us how the use Dagger to modernize their Pipelines: Civo, OpenMeter, SafeSpring, CraftCMS, and Ubisoft

3. Dagger Commanders

In any given month, somewhere around the world, people are presenting on Dagger at conferences, meetups and hackfests, most of whom don’t work for Dagger. We were thrilled to recognize many of these folks for their outsized impact to the community by launching our Dagger Commander program, with our first batch of Commanders announced in August. We’re excited to learn more from our Commanders in 2025.

4. Taking Dagger to new Frontiers

Is Dagger only about CI? This is one of our most common questions. On one hand, delivering 10X better CI is one of our top objectives, but as so many of you have observed, nothing about Dagger is inherently tied to CI. A pipeline-focused container engine can be used to automate a wide range of tasks and we keep hearing new use cases for Dagger. We’re seeing many people replacing their custom scripts with Dagger for example and a whole range of Data and AI pipeline examples. Dagger Commander Kambui Nurse, for example showed us how to use Dagger to generate Agentic Workflows, and then published a great article on the how AI can help us reduce technical debt, and Luke Marsden showed us how AI pipelines are just pipelines and, therefore, benefit greatly from being automated using Dagger. 

2024 was clearly the year AI emerged as a broadly transformational technology. While the overall noise level has been overwhelming, we have all found ourselves leveraging AI more and more in our daily lives, helping us write, edit, summarize, code and even test. It is clear to us that AI will have significant impacts on the world of DevOps. We’ve been using AI to build modules and even played around with an AI developer named Devin to generate PRs. We’re bullish about AI and the promise of Agents transforming our lives, and that only strengthens our belief that we need to lean heavily in making our platforms API-driven. Automation is critical for making humans more productive, it becomes even more important when you have AI tools and Agents in the mix. 

So What’s Next for 2025?

We have so many ambitious plans for 2025. We’re working on some big improvements to Dagger Cloud, now that we've transitioned the front end to WebAssembly (WASM), making it faster for us to ship features that improve visibility into Daggerized Pipelines. We’re also working on giving the dagger init command the ability to understand the user’s project and generate valuable functions like lint, build, test, or publish; like magic. Hooking up external secrets providers is also high on our list.

It’s also a poorly kept secret, at this point, that a brand new way of working with the Dagger Engine will be introduced soon. The new Dagger Shell not only makes it way easier to adopt Dagger, but also provides an easy API for AI-powered apps and agents to interact with Dagger. Solomon provided a sneak peek in the last Community Call of the year, and it’s well worth watching!

But that’s just the beginning. We have so much more planned, and can’t wait to share it all with you. But since nothing’s set in stone, we urge you to jump into our Discord and share your thoughts on what you’re trying to achieve with Dagger, any challenges you’re facing, and features you’d love to see us deliver.

Happy New Year, and happy building!