Preface
In September 2013, while browsing Hacker News, I stumbled across an article in Wired about a new technology called “Docker.”[1] As I read it, I became increasingly excited as I realized Docker’s revolutionary potential.
The company I’d worked at for over a decade was struggling to deliver software quickly enough. Provisioning environments was a costly, time-consuming, manual, and inelegant affair. Continuous integration was barely existent, and setting up development environments was an exercise in patience. As my job title included the words “DevOps Manager,” I was peculiarly motivated to solve these problems!
I recruited a couple of motivated coworkers (one of them now my coauthor) via a company mailing list, and together our skunkworks team labored to turn a beta tool into a business advantage, reducing the high costs of VMs and enabling new ways of thinking about building and deploying software. We even built and open sourced an automation tool (ShutIt) to suit our organization’s delivery needs.