Comment by kace91

There are two answers to “why x happened”.

You’re talking about the needs it solves, but I think others were talking about the developments that made it possible.

My understanding is that Docker brought features to the server and desktop (dependency management, similarity of dev machine and production, etc), by building on top of namespacing capabilities of Linux with a usability layer on top.

Docker couldn’t have existed until those features were in place and once they existed it was an inevitability for them to be leveraged.