What is the history of Docker as a company and how has it impacted the evolution of devops, infrastructure, and software engineering?

If you go back to when I joined Docker in 2013-14, it was just as the DevOps wave was rising. 

Before, I was at Puppet—one of the four big DevOps players alongside Chef, Ansible, and Salt—and at the time, we were really focused on this question of how you help developers create applications that impact their business and deliver them to production as quickly as possible.

Docker, which was open sourced in March 2013, just came on the scene and disrupted it. It did that because it was able to accomplish much of what that category of tools accomplish but with orders of magnitude less effort. 

Call it configuration management or automation—there's a number of different category labels that were thrown out at the time—and Docker was able to accomplish that much more than those tools in one-fiftieth the effort. That ignited my imagination when I was at Puppet, and six months later, I came to Docker. 

Docker had 20-some people at the time. Modern-day containerization didn't exist prior to March 2013 and then, a year later, it exploded. 

The reason is that Docker did indeed allow devs to move faster. It gave portability to applications so you weren't locked into any particular cloud or on-prem infrastructure. It allowed the DevOps tool chain just to move faster and safer.

Docker was the unlock of what the industry had been spending a good decade with DevOps looking for.

Now, with all that excitement came the dollars, the growth, and all the press adulation. The long story short is we stretched ourselves too thin looking at too many opportunities such that by 2019, despite having created this market, the company wasn't realizing its full potential. 

That led to some very, very serious discussions of options. We spent the summer really just exploring what we were going to do—we saw the potential, but the way the company was configured and growing, we weren't unlocking it. 

We’d been focused on this enterprise business, and we’d focused on production, deployment, technology, and product. 

But over here, we had all this bottom-up developer adoption, this fanatic love, consumption, and growth that we weren't paying attention to. 

Meanwhile, we were also spending a lot of money trying to acquire customers, trying to grow.

The question we asked then was, “What if we could allow the company to focus just on this developer market? Would that unlock value? Would that create great products for developers? Would that really, in some sense, allow the company to live up to its potential and the opportunity that it created back in 2013?"

I was leading product for all of that period through 2019. I was offered the job of CEO and I accepted because I, too, felt like there was an untapped opportunity here. That was the end of the beginning and the beginning of the second book of Docker.