I picked the name and wrote the first prototype (python2) of Docker in 2012. I had not read your document (dated 2010). I didn't really read English that well at the time, I probably wouldn't have been able to understand it anyways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery
More details for the curious: I wrote the design doc and implemented the prototype. But not in a vacuum. It was a lot work with Andrea, Jérôme and Gabriel. Ultimately, we all liked the name Docker. The prototype already had the notion of layers, lifetime management of containers and other fundamentals. It exposed an API (over TCP with zerorpc). We were working on container orchestration, and we needed a daemon to manage the life cycle of containers on every machine.
when I describe my work (I actually should have used quotes here), I generally give air quotes when saying it, or say "proto docker", as it provides context for what I did (there's also a lot of people who view docker as synonymous with containerization as a whole, and I say that containers existed way before me). I generally try to approach it humbly, but I am proud that I predicted and built what the industry seemingly needed (or at least is heavily using).
people have asked me why I didn't pursue it as a company, and my answer is a) I'm not much of an entrepreneur (main answer), and b) I felt it was a feature, not a "product", and would therefore only really profitable for those that had a product that could use it as a feature (which one could argue that product turned out to be clouds, i.e. they are the ones really making money off this feature). or as someone once said a feature isn't necessarily a product and a product isn't necessarily a company.
At the time, I didn't know what I was doing. Maybe my colleagues did some more, but I doubt that. I just wanted to stop waking up at night because our crappy container management code was broken again. The most brittle part was the lifecycle of containers (and their filesystem). I recall being very adamant about the layered filesystem, because it allowed to share storage and RAM across running (containerized) processes. This saves in pure storage and RAM usage, but also in CPU time, because the same code (like the libc for example) is cached across all processes. Of course this only works if you have a lot of common layers. But I remember at the time, it made for very noticeable savings. Anyways, fun tidbits.
I wonder how much faster/better it would have been if inspired by your academic research. Or maybe not knowing anything made it so we solved the problems at hand in order. I don't know. I left the company shortly after. They renamed to Docker, and made it what it is today.
Does that jive with your experience/memory at all? How much of your motivation for writing Docker could have been avoided if there were a sane way to compile a Python application into a single binary?
It’s funny, this era of dotCloud type IaaS providers kind of disappeared for a while, only to be semi-revived by the likes of Vercel (who, incidentally, moved away from a generic platform for running containers, in favor of focusing on one specific language runtime). But its legacy is containerization. And it’s kind of hard to imagine the world without containers now (for better or worse).
From an academic perspective, its "terrible", so much duplicate layers out in the world, from a practical perspective of delivering a product, it makes a lot of sense.
It's also simpler from the fact that I was trying to make it work for both what I call "persistent" containers (ala pets in the terminology) that could be upgraded in place and "ephemeral" containers (ala cattle) when in practice the work to enable upgrading in place (replacing layers on demand) to upgrade "persistent" containers I'm not sure is that useful (its technologically interesting, but that's different than useful).
My argument for this was that this actually improves runtime upgrading of systems. With dpkg/rpm, if you upgrade libc, your systems is actually temporarily in a state where it can't run any applications (in the delta of time when the old libc .so is deleted and the new one is created in its place, or completely overwrites it), any program that attempts to run in that (very) short period time, will fail (due to libc not really existing). By having a mechanism where layers could be swapped in essentially an atomic manner, no delete / overwrite of files occurs and therefore there is zero time when programs won't run.
In practice, the fact that a real world product came out with a very similar design/implementation makes me feel validated (i.e. a lot of phd work is one offs, never to see the light of day after the papers for it are published).
This is the internet and just about everyone could be diagnosed with Not Invented Here syndrome. First one to get recognition for creating something that's already been created is just a popular meme.
When it became clear that we had reached the limits of our existing buggy code, I pushed hard to get to work on the replacement. After what seemed an eternity pitching Solomon, I was finally allowed to work on it.
I wrote the design doc of Docker with the help of Andrea, Jérôme, Louis and Gabriel. I implemented the prototype in Python. To this day, three of us will still argue who really choose the name Docker. We are very good friends.
Not long after, I left the company. Because I was under paid, I could barely make ends meet at the time. I had to borrow money to see a doctor. I did not mind, it's the start-up life, am I right? I worked 80h/week happy. But then I realized not everybody was under paid. And other companies would pay me more for less work. When I asked, Solomon refused to pay me more, and after being denied three times, I quit. I never got any shares. I couldn't afford to buy the options anyways, and they had delayed the paperwork multiple times, such that I technically quit before the vesting started. I went to Google, were they showered me with cash in comparison. The next morning after my departure from dotCloud, Solomon raised everybody's salary. My friends took me to dinner to celebrate my sacrifice.
I am not privy to all the details after I left. But here is what I know. Andrea rewrote Docker in Go. It was made open source. Solomon even asked me to participate as an external contributor. For free of course. As a gesture to let me add my name to the commit history. Probably the biggest insult I ever received in life.
dotCloud was renamed Docker. The original dotCloud business was sold to a German company for the customers.
I believe Solomon saw the potential of Docker for all, and not merely an internal detail within a distributed system designed to orchestrate containers. My vision was extremely limited, and focused on reducing the suffering of my oncall duties.
A side story: the German company transfered to me the trademark of zerorpc, the open source network library powering dotCloud. I had done a lot of work on it. Solomon refused to hand me off the empty github/zerorpc group he was squatting. He offered to grant me access but retain control. I went for github/0rpc instead. I did not have time nor money to spend on a lawyer.
By this point you might think I have a vendetta against a specific individual. I can assure you that I tried hard to paint things fairly with a flattering light.
