Foreword

I heard about Docker for the first time in a YouTube video that was posted to Hacker News from PyCon 2013. In his five-minute lightning talk entitled “The Future of Linux Containers,” the creator of Docker, Solomon Hykes, was unveiling the future of how we ship and run software to the public—not just in Linux, but on nearly all platforms and architectures. Although he was abruptly silenced at the five-minute mark, it was clear to me that this technique of running Linux applications in sandboxed environments, with its user-friendly command-line tool and unique concepts such as image layering, was going to change a lot of things.

Docker vastly changed many software development and operations paradigms all at once. The ways we architect, develop, ship, and run software before and after Docker are vastly different. Although Docker does not prescribe a certain recipe, it forces people to think in terms of microservices and immutable infrastructure.

Once Docker was more widely adopted, and as people started to investigate the low-level technologies utilized by Docker, it became clearer that the secret to Docker’s success was not the technology itself, but the human-friendly interface, APIs, and ecosystem around the project.