Docker: Up & Running, 2nd 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 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 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

While ostensibly viewed as a virtualization platform by people who are unfamiliar with Docker, it is far more than that. Docker’s core domain spans a few crowded segments of the industry that include technologies like KVM, Xen, OpenStack, Mesos, Capistrano, ...