The Linux kernel's support for namespaces mostly isolates an application's view of the operating environment, including process trees, network, user IDs and mounted file systems, while the kernel's cgroups provide resource limiting for memory and CPU. Since version 0.9, Docker includes its own component (called libcontainer) to use virtualization facilities provided directly by the Linux kernel, in addition to using abstracted virtualization interfaces via libvirt, LXC and systemd-nspawn.
A Dockerfile is a text file that commonly specifies several aspects of a Docker container: the Linux distribution, installation commands for the programming language runtime environment and application source code.
dotCloud Inc. was founded by Kamel Founadi, Solomon Hykes, and Sebastien Pahl during the Y Combinator Summer 2010 startup incubator group and launched in 2011, and renamed to Docker Inc in 2013. The startup was also one of the 12 startups in Founder's Den first cohort. Hykes started the Docker project in France as an internal project within dotCloud, a platform-as-a-service company.
In 2017, Docker created the Moby project [d] for open research and development.
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