Docker

Founder / s: Solomon Hykes
Key people: Steven Singh (Chairman and CEO), Solomon Hykes (Founder, CTO & Chief Architect), Mike Gupta (CFO), Scott Johnston (COO), David Messina (VP of Enterprise Marketing) and Marianna Tessel (SVP Engineering)
Employees: 101 – 250

Docker, Inc. is the company behind the Docker open source platform, and is the master sponsor of the Docker ecosystem. Docker is an open platform for developers and system administrators to build, ship and run distributed applications. Delivery from months to minutes, frictionlessly move workload between data centers and the cloud and can achieve up to 20X greater efficiency in their use of computing resources.

Inspired by an active community and by transparent, open source innovation, Docker containers have been more more than 12 billion times and Docker is used by millions of developers across thousands of the world’s most innovative organizations, including ADP, GE, Goldman Sachs, Intuit, PayPal and Societe Generale.

History

Solomon Hykes started Docker in France as an internal project within dotCloud, a platform-as-a-service company, 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.

Docker was released as open source in March 2013. 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. 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.

A May 2016 analysis showed the following organizations as main contributors to Docker: The Docker team, Cisco, Google, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, and Red Hat.

A January 2017 analysis of LinkedIn profile mentions showed Docker presence grew by 160% in 2016.

In April 2014, it was revealed that the C.I.A.’s investment arm In-Q-Tel was a large investor in Docker. Docker has yet to respond to any questions about the nature of the investment and if any adulteration to the final product was requested by the spy agency and if so, what requests were met.