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Comment by Waterluvian

14 hours ago

Was it always called Docker? Do you think the branding played a larger role in success than you would have expected?

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Waterluvian

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ak217  14 hours ago

I believe Docker was always called Docker, but it grew directly out of the previous generation of the technology used by dotCloud (the company Solomon founded), which was using LXC with AUFS.

I think the breakthrough with Docker was bundling the AUFS-based image layer format with a centralized container image sharing registry. This was revolutionary at the time. But another huge element of success was Solomon and others evangelizing the technology relentlessly at meetups and conferences. I distinctly remember attending a demo in 2012 where the crowd was very excited to see the Docker workflow that we now take for granted, in large part because Solomon was so good at presenting it. At the time, I was working at a cloud PaaS company where we developed a similar technology on top of LXC and BTRFS (but no image registry). Docker really made me think hard about what we were doing, although I didn't end up making any moves.

https://jpetazzo.github.io/2017/02/24/from-dotcloud-to-docke...

  • shykes  9 hours ago

    You are correct :)

    > the previous generation of the technology used by dotCloud [...], which was using LXC with AUFS

    One small note, the earliest versions (2007-2011) were based on vserver then openvz, which predated lxc. Back then you had to patch the kernel to get container primitives. And since virtualization also required patches (eg. Xen), we had to carefully combine both sets of patches, which was poorly supported because nobody else was crazy enough to stack 2 kinds of virtualization!