History[edit]

Solomon Hykes started Docker in France as an internal project within dotCloud, a platform-as-a-service company,[9] with initial contributions by other dotCloud engineers including Andrea Luzzardi and Francois-Xavier Bourlet.

 Jeff Lindsay also became involved as an independent collaborator.

Docker represents an evolution of dotCloud's proprietary technology, which is itself built on earlier open-source projects such as Cloudlets.

The software debuted to the public in Santa Clara at PyCon in 2013.[11]

Docker was released as open source in March 2013.[12]

On March 13, 2014, with the release of version 0.9, Docker dropped LXC as the default execution environment and replaced it with its own libcontainer library written in the Go programming language.

Adoption

  • On September 19, 2013, Red Hat and Docker announced a collaboration around Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and OpenShift
  • In November 2014 Docker container services were announced for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).[16]
  • On November 10, 2014, Docker announced a partnership with Stratoscale.[17]
  • On December 4, 2014, IBM announced a strategic partnership with Docker that enables Docker to integrate more closely with the IBM Cloud.[18]
  • On June 22, 2015, Docker and several other companies announced that they are working on a new vendor and operating-system-independent standard for software containers.
  • As of October 24, 2015, the project had over 25,600 GitHub stars (making it the 20th most-starred GitHub project), over 6,800 forks, and nearly 1,100 contributors.
  • In April 2016, Windocks, an independent ISV released a port of Docker's open source project to Windows, supporting Windows Server 2012 R2 and Server 2016, with all editions of SQL Server 2008 onward.
  • A May 2016 analysis showed the following organizations as main contributors to Docker: The Docker team, Cisco, Google, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, and Red Hat.
  • On October 4, 2016, Solomon Hykes announced InfraKit as a new self-healing container infrastructure effort for Docker container environments.
  • A January 2017 analysis of LinkedIn profile mentions showed Docker presence grew by 160% in 2016. The software has been downloaded more than 13 billion times as of 2017.