Docker: Up & Running, 3rd Edition

Chapter 1. Introduction

Docker was first introduced to the world—with no pre-announcement and little fanfare—by Solomon Hykes, founder and CEO of a company then called dotCloud, in a five-minute lightning talk at the Python Developers Conference in Santa Clara, California, on March 15, 2013. At the time of this announcement, only about 40 people outside of dotCloud had been given the opportunity to play with Docker.

Within a few weeks of this announcement, there was a surprising amount of press. The source code was quickly released on GitHub as a public and fully open source project. Over the next few months, more and more people in the industry started hearing about Docker and how it was going to revolutionize the way software was built, delivered, and run. And within a year, almost no one in the industry was unaware of Docker, but many were still unsure what it was exactly, and why people were so excited about it.

Docker is a tool that promises to easily encapsulate the process of creating a distributable artifact for any application, deploying it at scale into any environment, and streamlining the workflow and responsiveness of Agile software organizations.

The Promise of Docker

Initially, many people who were unfamiliar with Docker viewed it as some sort of virtualization platform, but in reality, it was the first widely accessible tool to build on top of a much newer technology called containerization. Docker and Linux containers have had a significant impact on a wide range ...