3.4 KiB
History of containers ... and Docker
First experimentations
Containers have been around for a very long time indeed.
(See this excellent blog post by Serge Hallyn for more historic details.)
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The VPS age (until 2007-2008)
Containers = cheaper than VMs
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Users: hosting providers.
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Highly specialized audience with strong ops culture.
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The PAAS period (2008-2013)
Containers = easier than VMs
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I can't speak for Heroku, but containers were (one of) dotCloud's secret weapon
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dotCloud was operating a PaaS, using a custom container engine.
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This engine was based on OpenVZ (and later, LXC) and AUFS.
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It started (circa 2008) as a single Python script.
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By 2012, the engine had multiple (~10) Python components.
(and ~100 other micro-services!) -
End of 2012, dotCloud refactors this container engine.
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The codename for this project is "Docker."
First public release of Docker
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March 2013, PyCon, Santa Clara:
"Docker" is shown to a public audience for the first time. -
It is released with an open source license.
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Very positive reactions and feedback!
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The dotCloud team progressively shifts to Docker development.
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The same year, dotCloud changes name to Docker.
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In 2014, the PaaS activity is sold.
Docker early days (2013-2014)
First users of Docker
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PAAS builders (Flynn, Dokku, Tsuru, Deis...)
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PAAS users (those big enough to justify building their own)
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CI platforms
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developers, developers, developers, developers
Positive feedback loop
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In 2013, the technology under containers (cgroups, namespaces, copy-on-write storage...) had many blind spots.
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The growing popularity of Docker and containers exposed many bugs.
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As a result, those bugs were fixed, resulting in better stability for containers.
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Any decent hosting/cloud provider can run containers today.
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Containers become a great tool to deploy/move workloads to/from on-prem/cloud.
Maturity (2015-2016)
Docker becomes an industry standard
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Docker reaches the symbolic 1.0 milestone.
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Existing systems like Mesos and Cloud Foundry add Docker support.
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Standardization around the OCI (Open Containers Initiative).
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Other container engines are developed.
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Creation of the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation).
Docker becomes a platform
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The initial container engine is now known as "Docker Engine."
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Other tools are added:
- Docker Compose (formerly "Fig")
- Docker Machine
- Docker Swarm
- Kitematic
- Docker Cloud (formerly "Tutum")
- Docker Datacenter
- etc.
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Docker Inc. launches commercial offers.
Standardization of container runtimes
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Docker 1.11 (2016) introduces containerd and runc
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Kubernetes 1.5 (2016) introduces the CRI
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First releases of CRI-O (2017), kata containers...