I remember being introduced to Solomon in Dec 2008 (a friend of a friend) and he came to my apartment in Los Angeles a few months later to demo his "dotCloud" project. He told me how he was using Mercurial to have a version-controlled repository of an entire root filesystem (including char and block device special files under /dev; he had to extend Mercurial to add support for them). I found this pretty cool and I could see the potential. He could check out multiple copies, make different changes, merge them, etc. It was basically a revision-controlled VM/container/system image. I was working on somewhat related technology at the time, http://qemudo.sourceforge.net/?, a web-interface to QEMU virtual machines where whole VMs could be created in <1 second by using copy-on-write disk images (QCOW.) Everyone I showed this to back in 2006-2008 was dumbfounded. The idea that VM creation could be a lightweight operation was brand new back then. Normally it involved copying a multi-gigabyte disk image. All the pieces of the tech stack were available to do this, but no well-polished product that combined them together existed.
Of course dotCloud ended up being a precursor of Docker itself, and took the idea of "lightweight easy-to-create container" to an even higher level. shykes if you are reading this, hi!
Of course dotCloud ended up being a precursor of Docker itself, and took the idea of "lightweight easy-to-create container" to an even higher level. shykes if you are reading this, hi!