Docker: Up & Running

Chapter 1. Introduction

The Birth of Docker

Docker was first introduced to the world—with no pre-announcement and little fanfare—by Solomon Hykes, founder and CEO of 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 dotCloud been given the opportunity to play with Docker.

Within a few weeks of this announcement, there was a surprising amount of press. The project was quickly open-sourced and made publicly available on GitHub, where anyone could download and contribute to the 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.

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

While ostensibly viewed as a virtualization platform, Docker is far more than that. Docker’s domain spans a few crowded segments of the industry that include technologies like KVM, Xen, OpenStack, Mesos, Capistrano, Fabric, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, SaltStack, and so ...