Introduction to Containers and Container Security

Docker was introduced in 2013 in a short talk called The Future of Linux Containers. Solomon Hykes, co-founder of Docker, Inc., wrote the following line into his terminal:

$ docker run busybox /bin/echo hello world

Then said:

So what just happened here is that it generated a new Linux container and allocated a new file system for it, mounted a read/write layer, allocated a network interface, set an IP for it, and then executed the process in there, captured its output and printed it to me.

This command encapsulates what Docker brought to the table. Linux Containers already existed, but were cumbersome to use. Docker introduced a clean CLI, a daemon to manage images and containers, and a registry for sharing them — all with sane defaults. That simplicity opened containers to a wider audience beyond sysadmins.

After the hype of Docker, a few Google employees started a new project called Kubernetes. It was a container orchestration system, designed to manage containers at scale. It was open-sourced in 2014 and became the de facto standard for container orchestration in production environments.