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Docker Tutorial · Docker Basics · Lesson 6 of 26

Docker History & Versions

Where Docker came from, how containers went from a PaaS company's internal tool to the standard way to package software, the open standards that followed, and which versions are current.

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How Docker started

Linux already had the building blocks of containers: chroot (1979 in Unix), namespaces (from 2002) and cgroups (2008), combined in projects such as LXC. What was missing was a simple way to package an application with its dependencies and run it anywhere.

dotCloud, a platform-as-a-service company, built that tool internally. Solomon Hykes presented it publicly at PyCon in March 2013, and it was released as open source as Docker. The company renamed itself Docker, Inc. later that year. Docker's key ideas were the image (layered, shareable filesystem snapshots), the Dockerfile and Docker Hub for sharing images.

Timeline

  1. Docker Engine 29Current
    • The current major release line of Docker Engine
  2. Docker Engine 28End of life · May 2026
  3. Docker Engine 27End of life · May 2025
  4. Docker Engine 23.0Historic
    • BuildKit becomes the default builder on Linux
  5. Docker Engine Compose v2Historic
    • Compose rewritten in Go as the docker compose plugin; Compose v1 (docker-compose) reached end of life in 2023
  6. Docker Engine Kubernetes removes dockershimHistoric
    • Kubernetes 1.24 talks to container runtimes such as containerd directly; Docker-built images keep working everywhere
  7. Docker Engine containerd joins CNCFHistoric
    • Docker donates its core runtime; it graduates in 2019 and becomes the most common Kubernetes runtime
  8. Docker Engine Open Container InitiativeHistoric
    • Docker, CoreOS and others standardise the image format and runtime (runc) as vendor-neutral specifications
  9. Docker Engine Docker 1.0Historic
    • The first release declared ready for production
  10. Docker Engine Docker open-sourcedHistoric
    • First shown at PyCon by Solomon Hykes of dotCloud

What changed over time

Early Docker (2013 to 2016) Docker today
Runtime One monolithic daemon Docker Engine on containerd and runc (OCI)
Builds Classic builder BuildKit: parallel stages, cache mounts, secrets, multi-platform
Multi-container apps docker-compose (Python) docker compose plugin (Go), Compose Specification
Orchestration Docker Swarm competing Kubernetes dominant; Swarm still available
Images Docker-specific format OCI images, used by every runtime and registry

Resources

Last reviewed 21 October 2026. Release and support dates come from the official release pages linked above.

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