Solomon Hykes was a co-founder of the platform-as-a-service company dotCloud, where his team ran customer applications inside Linux containers. Out of that internal technology came Docker, the tool he is best known for creating.
In March 2013, at PyCon US in Santa Clara, Hykes gave a five-minute lightning talk titled “The future of Linux Containers.” In it he showed Docker to the public for the first time, live-demoing how a single command-line tool could package and run an application in an isolated container built on existing Linux kernel features. The talk is preserved on video.
In the demo, Hykes explained that dotCloud had been using Linux containers in production but that the underlying technology was hard for others to use, which is what Docker set out to fix. He described Docker as a way to take any application and ship it in a lightweight, portable container that would run the same way anywhere.
That short demonstration marked the beginning of Docker’s rapid rise. Hykes went on to lead Docker as its chief technology officer as the project grew from a developer side-project into a company and an industry-wide standard for packaging software.