The Docker story

Docker was born out of a lightning talk presentation, entitled The future of Linux Containers, delivered at PyCon on Friday, March 15, 2013. The presenter was Solomon Hykes, the founder of Docker. On that day, the software world changed even though Linux containers had been evolving in the Linux community for nearly 13 years. It was not the technology that Solomon shepherded that got the Docker movement off the ground, it was the vision behind it and the packaging of the container ecosystem. Solomon's vision was to create tools for mass innovation and his packaging of Linux containers in the Docker experience delivered this powerful technology and put containers within the grasp of mere mortals. Today, Docker runs on tens of millions of servers around the world.

Here are some notes on Linux containers:

• They have been evolving since 2000
• Linux Containers (LXC) was released in 2008
• Google's lmctfy (let me container that for you) supports Docker's libcontainer in 2015
• Standards emerged, including OCI, and CNCF, around 2015
• Center for internet security benchmark support 

Over the last 5 years, thousands of developers joined Docker's open source community to deliver what is known as Docker Community Edition (Docker Engine-Community). Docker has remained committed to an open platform and a level playing field. Docker has donated significant assets to the open source and standards community, including the Docker container format and runtime, to provide the cornerstone of the Open Container Initiative (OCI) in 2015 and the container runtime to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2017. 

At Dockercon in 2017, Solomon Hykes released Project Moby, which effectively gives anyone the tooling they need to build their own Docker. This was very cool and ultimately in the best interests of the container community. However, this well-intentioned effort led to some comprehensive repackaging of Docker community assets without community buy-in. From a big-picture point of view, Docker has demonstrated its commitment to the community and Solomon's vision of tools for mass innovation.