Google Thanks Docker, and Solomon Hykes Comes Home

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Kelsey Hightower and Solomon Hykes sat a few chairs apart at the Kubernetes 10th anniversary for a chat in front of an auditorium hall at Google headquarters. It felt like group therapy.

Their conversation followed an emotional presentation led by Eric Brewer, Google’s vice president of infrastructure, a Google fellow, and the senior executive at Google in 2014 who oversaw the Kubernetes pitch to the Google executive team. Brewer choked up a bit, and so did several in the crowd. His history, friendships, and work at the University of California at Berkeley researching container technologies — well, it all welled up.

However, Hykes, Docker’s founder and now the co-founder of Dagger, did not have that camaraderie back in 2014, unlike the other Google engineers who spoke at the “KuberTENes” event. Not at all. Hykes thought of him and his team as outsiders, nobodies who moved from France to San Francisco to build Docker.

“I mean, it’s all personal,” Hykes said. “You build these things. You’re so invested in it. It can’t not be personal. And I’m really appreciating this, this event and this phase of the community, where it feels like, OK, this is the container family. And I feel part of it, I feel welcome in it, and I enjoy this phase because I didn’t feel that way before.”

Competition With Docker

Hykes and his team’s work catalyzed Google. Docker abstracted the Linux container into something with a beautiful UX. Google watched, knowing, in some respects, how much Docker’s early work on Kubernetes meant to the future of Google Cloud.

Yes, it was dramatic, contentious, and exciting — indeed. The New Stack saw what Docker did. In 2015 and 2016, we wrote three ebooks about Docker to capture the significance of the container movement.

But then it got real. The threat of a fork changed the tenor of the discussion. As IBM’s Phil Estes, now with Amazon Web Services, told us in 2019, the battling parties came together. They began working on open source projects to keep the container image portable across different environments.

Hightower, now retired from Google, recounted with Hykes how Docker had already released the second version of Swarm. In 2015, at DockerCon in Seattle, Hightower said he sat next to Brian Grant, an engineer from Google, looking at this new version of Docker Swarm. This Docker orchestrator competed with Kubernetes. Hightower remarked to Grant that the Swarm UX looked great.

“A lot of the Kubernetes concepts, you made them better in some ways, and I thought, ‘that was it.’ A lot of the Googlers are like, “Oh, man, we’re done. Look — they won on the UX side again.”

‘Lightning in a Bottle’

Hightower used his time as emcee for the event to thank Hykes. And you could tell how much it resonated with the crowd in the large Google auditorium. Hykes and the Docker crew deserved the recognition.

Back in 2014. the Google Cloud team faced Microsoft, which had the market position to promote Azure. AWS had discovered how to leverage open source to create services as a disruptive way to commercialize open source, “operationalize” and deliver it with high margins, said Craig McLuckie, one of the Kubernetes creators in one of the evening’s talks.

Google Cloud needed to find its way.

“And for me, the journey really started with Docker,” McLuckie said. “And Docker just did this amazing job of unlocking a lot of the core technologies that Google is built on and making them accessible to developers. Solomon really put lightning in a bottle in terms of creating that immediate, immediately accessible developer experience.”

Hightower continued giving Docker credit, a theme throughout the evening.

“Don’t think Kubernetes exists without Docker,” Hightower said. “Like seriously, Docker changed the game? Literally. I was very surprised that this abstraction came from what I considered the developer community.

“I used to work in config management infrastructures code. Remember all the DevOps stuff, the group therapy we used to have about deployments? That community didn’t create this thing … it was focused on user experience. It took all that complicated technology and hid it.”

Docker allowed Google to make a bet on a container cloud, Brewer said — and Kubernetes served as a platform to get there.

“And this is the point where Docker is on the rise,” Brewer said. “It’s making containers popular. And I kind of feel like this is our chance. People were starting to care about containers. Maybe we can make them actually care about a container-oriented cloud. Right?”

‘Thanks, We Got It From Here’

Right. But then what about Docker? Today, it’s a company that has done well for itself, selling its developer tools and desktop software. But it also got rolled by Google. Google took the win, and today, it has that container cloud offering. It took 50 or so years, starting in the late 1960s, with the first concepts of distributed computing.

In the 1990s came the emergence of virtualization and the idea of what we see today, with the container as a process. By 2015, Docker emerged and helped it all come together.

“It was a very abrupt transition for me at least, maybe for the others in the Docker team, from ‘Go away, no one cares,’ to, ‘Thanks, we got it from here,’ “Hykes said. “Also, ‘go away.’ I mean, it’s true, we were a little inconvenient. We were taking too much space.”

Hykes said they just wanted to belong, to be included. However, he knew that the container movement represented far more than Docker, just as Google knew they couldn’t do it all themselves.

The drama of the 2010s did result in something. Kubernetes is today an open source project that is only second in the world to Linux.

And for that, you can thank Docker.