There is no question in my mind that Docker was, by far, the most disruptive technology of 2015. What barely registered on the radar for many in 2014, became something shiny in Q1, advanced to thinking material in Q2, reached "you have to be crazy to run that in production" by Q3, and is now on everyone's three year plan.
In case you haven't been paying attention, Linux is in a mad dash to copy everything that made Solaris 10 amazing when it launched in 2005. Everyone has recognized the power of Zones, ZFS and DTrace but licensing issues and the sheer effort required to implement the technologies has made it a long process.
The ball hit the net but from which side. Can you tell? Over the past three years, companies have pushed themselves to the cloud for many reasons but have they landed in the wrong side of the net?
Many companies have mistaken moving to the cloud for a goal to be achieved and it is natural to make that mistake. Companies see the bottom line, that building services in PAAS or IAAS clouds lowers the costs of bootstrapping risky projects, speeds up time to market and enables greater flexibility. They naturally make moving everything to the cloud a business target.
They miss that driving these benefits are the ways that automation and infrastructure as a service force the modernization and industrialization of a company's IT teams and processes. Even if a company isn't using any modern software driven deployment techniques, it is the industrialization of infrastructure on the provider's side that allows a "machine" to be spec'ed, purchased, racked, cabled, and installed at the push of a button or the call of an API. It is this change in the way that IT works that is improving the bottom line, speeding time to market and increasing the business agility.