Hi, I'm the creator of Docker and came across this post. It's always fun to see other engineers think about how you designed a system. I haven't been involved in developing Docker in many years, but it's a fun trip down memory lane.

I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.

I was in the audience when you gave the 5-minute docker lightning talk at PyCon US Santa Clara in 2013. I remember chatting with a friend/colleague about it (https://nvie.com/about/) and we both agreed it was the most interesting lightning talk that day.

What’s funny, though, is that since it was “just” a lightning talk, it didn’t even make it into the roundup of notes I sent to my team after PyCon. But a mere year later, Docker was how my team (and seemingly everyone else) ran projects locally.

Any interesting memories from that day in 2013? From your perspective, what happened in the year that followed that caused docker to be adopted so widely? Were there other key moments or turning points?

I'm a big fan of docker and mainly just want to say thanks for bringing it about.

I remember my first time trying to use a container was about 2015 on a beach cafe's wifi in Bocas del Toro, Panama. You can imagine how it went...

After a brief hiatus though I was back to it and since then it's been a core part of many a local dev stack and even production stack (compose) I've set up. I recall the magic moment for me being when I first realised you could mount src to use all your local native dev tools while completely virtualising everything else, including and especially whatever combo of runtimes and dependencies you need.

It was just a lightbulb moment, like it entirely solves 'works on my machine', setting new people up on a project, it just seems like how software engineering ought to work and once you have experienced it it's difficult to go back.

I'm curious, as its creator are you still using it, or as someone who can clearly look ahead to experimental ways of doing things are you on to the next thing whatever that may be? If so, what is it? :-)

Thank you for inventing Docker, it truly changed the life of many developers.

I was there when dotCloud announced Docker in 2013 and it was truly pragmatic. I had previously burned my hands on LXC, Juju Charms and Vagrant to containerize the apps, but it was all a house of cards. I remember helping a friend ship his whole Vagrant Box to the interview panel for a job!

It’s incredible to think about how much boilerplate Docker removed right at it's launch. Thank you.

By the way, I just launched my new thing today :) They say lightning never strikes twice, but you never know!

I hope the plug is appropriate in this setting - apologies if not.

https://dagger.io/blog/dagger-10-beta/

I'm a super fan of docker and I also want to say thanks for designing it.

I think docker is not weird, it is very linear.

Docker has the merit to take a bunch of tools and to create an organized view of it.

I want to point you to Misterio https://github.com/daitangio/misterio which is a very thin layer on top of docker compose.

It simplify my homelab and works like a charm, and it is a waaaaay easier to use than k8s.

Thank you again, and let me know if you plan a trip in Milan :) for a meeting

I'm curious what made think of it in the first place? What was your thought process that made you think that these Linux primitives give the opportunity to make it a platform for distributing and deploying packaged applications and eliminating a lot of the issue around "it works my machine" argument?

You may have already answered this somewhere, so feel free to tell me what to search for or if you have a link to hand, that works too :)

Hi, question from a sysadmin / network engineer. Why localhost with port forwarding? Why not native mechanism like routing and mdns? I’ve gave Docker and other container managers which do networking the same way a try a few times and I always found the network unnecessarily complicated. Eventually I came across OrbStack which uses the aforementioned mechanisms. Every container gets an IP address in the local bridge and responds to mdsns queries. This plays especially well in “compose” scenario when services on containers can all use original port numbers. And containers can be accessed with hostnames, so there won’t be conflict between port numbers especially if I run multiple composed stacks.

Since we're reminiscing, I was working for Engine Yard when Docker was released. I remember engineering and product leadership huddled around a desk wondering aloud whether we needed to do something about it.

In retrospect, of course, it was earth-shattering for the company, despite a valiant effort. The entire expertise of deploying long lived Linux servers and carefully shepherding them through change management with Chef became a relic to most developers. Totally changed the way applications were deployed.

Was an exciting time!

So you are responsible for my career and the reason i can put food on my table. Thank you.

People are underestimating now big of a tech shift it was back in the day.

Hi Solomon,

Docker completely changed my life. When I started using it in 2014, I really appreciated how well it solved certain problems I had for web development.

It spawned a near endless stream of contract work and video courses for about 10 years, along with being introduced to the Docker captain's program early on. Met so many great people and had a chance to visit a few countries around the world through Docker.

It's one of those pieces of tech that has followed me around for half my career and will likely continue until the end. It's the best community I've ever been a part of.

In my opinion, Docker is probably the defining computer technology of the 2010s.

I know that containerization on Unix-like systems didn't begin with Docker, but I definitely think Docker was the first accessible interface for it.

I think app containerization is something that has so many benefits and it's the obvious correct approach for its use cases once you wrap your head around it. This was already understood at big tech companies pre-Docker (e.g. Borg, Tupperware, user app sandboxing on iOS and Android), but I think it really took something like docker to make it mainstream.

As far as I'm concerned, you can probably consider yourself like the Ken Thompson or Dennis Ritchie of your era in terms of the impacts of your contribution.

I appreciate what docker did in pushing a more accessible UX on top of containerization and getting people to think more about reproducible setups and sandboxing. Its popularity was definitely one of the catalysts in that direction.

I'm curious if when you were originally designing it, what tradeoffs you chose between, for example did you consider a non-daemonized design or was it daemonized from the beginning?

Having had some time now and also seeing how other people have riffed off of the idea and refined it, what would you have done differently? If you have a retrospective at some point already, I'd be interested to read it.

I have some accumulation of personal architectural guidelines that I built up from trial-and-error + reading others' experience and reflecting on how their design could've affected something I made. As a result, I really value those kinds of discussions about tradeoffs.

As a backend developer, I am hopelessly grateful for docker and containerization in general. The old days with stateful application servers were AWFUL.

Thank you.

For one, did you get rich beyond all comprehension and did you start a band with your wealth?

Second, do you still program ?

I was lucky enough to get in this industry when Docker was new. Sure beats trying to figure out why X happens on machine A and doesn’t on machine B.

I remember going to a demo of Docker in South Carolina before it hit 1.0. Came back and wrote the “Docker is the Heroku Killer” article on my blog and it was the first thing I wrote that made the front page of HN.

Docker ended up as a primary way of delivering, packaging applications etc., for the web and beyond.

What was your imagined use case when you first came up with it?

Did you think Docker as it is used in the industry right now is where you imagined it would be used?

Any use cases for it that the industry missed but you think would have made things even better?

Oh man, the only big struggle I have with docker, is the abandonment of Docker Swarm.

I've struggled for years wanting something that wasn't K3S or K8S. Something good for small cluster management that had a lower level of entry, that I'd feel better handing off to other teams.

Docker Swarm seemed to fight the puzzle, but falls short based on things that needed to be fixed or finalized, that just never happened.

Any reason that whole pathway got abandoned? Other than just "Google uses Kubes so just everyone can use it"?

Given all the popularity and use cases you know today. Is there any fundamental design choice you would have done differently?

What made you decide to use a URI as the namespace for images? I like it, but I think it's been very misunderstood which has caused people to dislike it.

Thanks for making Docker :)

Prior to the creation of Docker, did you have experience with other containerization technologies like Solaris Zones and FreeBSD Jails?

Did you at some point, either prior to or after making Docker for Linux, consider building something like Docker on top of FreeBSD Jails?

As a user of both Linux and FreeBSD, running Docker containers and Jails on each of them respectively, it would be interesting to see what FreeBSD Jails could be with something like Docker built on top of it while also taking advantage of other features on FreeBSD like fully using ZFS snapshots, ZFS send/recv, ZFS clone, vnet, and so on. Such that spinning up a container would under the hood receive ZFS snapshots from the “Docker registry” equivalent server, and it might clone the snapshot locally before starting up a container instance so that multiple container instances would be using the same locally available ZFS snapshot that was received once from the “Docker registry” equivalent.

I've been actively using Docker for most of my projects over the past few years and I sincerely thank you for brainstorming and getting it out in the market.

The sole idea of containerising an application, its utils and dependencies all into one container is a real big deal in early 2010s. The product has been so visionary that it has been re-pivoted as secure sandboxes which is most needed right now. Kudos!

Would you consider writing Docker/moby in a different language, if you were to create it scratch today?

I was a dotcloud customer around 2012. You might have responded to one of my many support emails.

General question. When you were designing Docker, did you anticipate the success it would achieve?

Were you around for the big Moby open sourcing? What went down from your perspective? If I recall, it was a fairly dramatic move that was not driven by the interests of Docker corp.

Given how things have changed since your creation and the way things are going, are there any things you would have done differently?

> I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.

Why doesn't docker respect unix filesystem permissions? I use docker on a shared server, i can delete docker images of other users. This is bonkers.

Is it a defect of a particular docker setup (following standard instructions on ubuntu), or it's an intrinsic feature of docker itself?

Back in 2012 we used to give talks about how we ran all our CI builds in LXC containers, that came about because a bunch of us came from the BSD / Solaris world of jails and it just felt natural.

The folks at infracoders / DevOps meetups would think we were a bit "out there", then what do you know - 2013 rolls around and we quickly started to shift to Docker (too early some might say), but not long after shifting from LXC to Docker it seemed many others finally started to come round to containerisation.

Fast forward to 2026 and I've recently done some work with a client who is only just "getting into containers" (a Windows shop).

Thanks for your early work to bring better containerisation to Linux Solomon. It's funny to think we're 13 years from Dockers release. Time flies.

I’d love to hear more about some limitations/tradeoffs of docker that you made at the time that you regret in hindsight. Was there anything that you wish didn’t get baked into the “default norms” for containers, or areas that would benefit from more attention and redesigns?

I’ve been following dagger and it’s been really interesting to see the evolution of the design, and new set of abstractions. There’s also nix which has seen popularity, with their approach of building layered oci containers.

Not really a question, but just saying "hi!". You might not remember this, but in 2012 I was about 13 years old, interested in computers, and had no one to really talk to about them. By some miracle my father (who is in no way in tech!) found some connections to YC and organized for us to come out to California to see a bunch of companies. dotCloud was one such company, I still have the t-shirt! I remember chatting with you and you taught me how to use pip, it's a fond memory I look back on often.

I hope one day I can say something like “I made Docker” :,)

Thank you for docker.

Went from the good old days of vagrant (xen/kvm) to lxc/lxd to docker, and docker truly clicked all the way from development to production.

But honestly, thanks to Docker hub even more. The CLI is only one part of the puzzle, the worldwide registry is an immense undertaking.

How did MirageOS end up powering parts of Docker stack?

Did you ever reach out to the kernel folks while working on Docker?

My memory from that era when Docker was getting big was our biggest user completely ignored us. Which I thought was quite odd at the time.

Thanks for making so many lives easier!

Docker is probably the highest-profile software written in Go. Are you happy with that choice? Would you do it in Rust if it was available at the time, or Zug?

The weirdest part of docker, to me, is that it was setup as a client/server system. Why was that? Podman for quite some time didn't support it.

Was it all for the `docker.sock`?

Thanks for your innovation and helping developers! If Docker hasn't been your focus in recent years, what have you mainly been working on and what's been your favorite?

Hi Solomon! Great product. How do you feel about the need for a central registry and not a p2p approach for distributing images? I always felt like p2p was the better and more scalable approach. Any reason why you decided on the centralized approach?

You're actually the coding GOAT btw.

Thanks for developing such a valuable tool!

Love docker, it changed the development ecosystems for the better.

In recent years I have shifted over to Podman, primarily because it defaults to rootless without a daemon.

Is that something you considered for docker early on , and if so why did you decide on running as root?

How does it feel to have fundamentally changed how many/most enterprise software runs?

Why did you make compose silently rewrite firewalls?

A while back you had this tweet which often gets cited, or at least _i_ personally think about it a lot.

> If WASM+WASI existed in 2008, we wouldn't have needed to created Docker. That's how important it is. Webassembly on the server is the future of computing. A standardized system interface was the missing link. Let's hope WASI is up to the task!

How are you feeling about WASI today?

Not related to the topic but. Do you have any book recommendations? Not necessarily programming or system related, looking for great books ~

Nothing weird about it - extremely logical and it’s the gateway to so many great self hosted apps.

When it comes to the author calling Docker weird, after looking at some of their other postings, something about glass houses comes to mind.

basically my whole career has revolved around being good with docker and other related tech, so thank you! started on 0.7 :D

Do you think e.g. students learning docker syntax at a uni is beneficial in 2026 or you think LLM-assisted programming means that Docker will become an abstraction under an abstraction and its setup will be mostly automated by LLMs? I find myself very rarely debugging or handwriting dockerfiles nowadays!

Thank you for making it :)

I like to tell people the story of how I got a pre-release peek and frankly didn't understand what I was looking at. You emailed me in reply to a comment I made around that time[0].

Funny how little has changed except the names, I guess.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5347255

If you were implementing an operating system (free from compatibility concerns), what would you do differently to better support lightweight containers?

Legend, thank you!

What learnings did you take from Docker when conceiving Dagger? Or is it more about unlocking BuildKit?

Do you feel that docker was done for as of about ten years ago and something better should have replaced it?

Seems like this thread has become an AMA lmao

Oh wow, hi! I think my biggest “gripe” with docker is that everyone grabs it as a hammer and views many problems as a nail. Am I way off base with that? What was your original vision for how docker might be used in the wild?

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Thanks but I still run LXCs /s

You're a genius well done making containerization actually happen.

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I am firmly convinced that had Rust been more mature at the time, the pivot from Python would have beem into Rust instead of Go.

Am I on the right track?