On March 20, 2013, at PyCon US in Santa Clara, California, Solomon Hykes gave a five-minute lightning talk titled “The future of Linux Containers.” This was the first time Docker was shown to the public. The talk survives on video and remains a primary record of the moment.
In the talk Hykes explained that his company, dotCloud, had been using Linux containers in production but that the underlying technology was difficult for others to adopt. Docker was the tool they built to make containers simple, and in the demo he showed how a single command could package an application and run it in an isolated container.
The reveal was brief and the speaker was cut off near the five-minute mark, but the demonstration of a friendly command-line tool, image layering, and sandboxed Linux applications signaled a significant shift in how software would be packaged and shipped.
From that short talk, Docker grew quickly into an open-source project, a company, and eventually an industry standard. The event is widely treated as the public birth of the modern container movement that later led to orchestration systems such as Kubernetes.