A brief overview of containers

Believe it or not, containers and their precursors have been around for over 15 years in the Linux and Unix operating systems. If you look deeper into the fundamentals of how containers operate, you can see their roots in the chroot technology that was invented all the way back in 1970. Since the early 2000s, FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, Open VZ, Warden, and finally Docker all made significant attempts at encapsulating containerization technology for the end user.

While the VServer's project and first commit (running several general purpose Linux server on a single box with a high degree of independence and security (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1430092/?reload=true)) may have been one of the most interesting historical junctures in container history, it's clear that Docker set the container ecosystem on fire back in late 2013 when they went full in on the container ecosystem and decided to rebrand from dotCloud to Docker. Their mass marketing of container appeal set the stage for the broad market adoption we see today and is a direct precursor of the massive container orchestration and scheduling platforms we're writing about here.

Over the past five years, containers have grown in popularity like wildfire. Where containers were once relegated to developer laptops, testing, or development environments, you'll now see them as the building blocks of powerful production systems. They're running highly secure banking workloads and trading systems, powering IoT, keeping our on-demand economy humming, and scaling up to millions of containers to keep the products of the 21st century running at peak efficiency in both the cloud and private data centers. Furthermore, containerization technology permeates our technological zeitgest, with every technology conference in the world devoting a significant portion of their talks and sessions devoted to building, running, or developing in containers.

At the beginning of this compelling story lies Docker and their compelling suite of developer-friendly tools. Docker for macOS and Windows, Compose, Swarm, and Registry have been incredibly powerful tools that have shaped workflows and changed how companies develop software. They've built a bridge for containers to exist at the very heart of the Software Delivery Life Cycle (SDLC), and a remarkable ecosystem has sprung up around those containers. As Malcom McLean revolutionized the physical shipping world in the 1950s by creating a standardized shipping container, which is used today for everything from ice cube trays to automobiles, Linux containers are revolutionizing the software development world by making application environments portable and consistent across the infrastructure landscape.

We'll pick this story up as containers go mainstream, go to production, and go big within organizations. We'll look at what makes a container next.