Why was Docker first launched at PyCon?

Question

Solomon Hykes famously launched Docker in 2013 at PyCon with this talk (amazing 5 minute watch if you haven't seen it yet): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW9CAH9nSLs&ab_channel=dotcloudtvAs someone who wasn't involved in the industry at this space, it's curious to me that PyCon was the place for Docker to launch, given the talk seems to have nothing to do with python / docker itself doesn't seem to have anything to do with python specifically (although of course python devs use docker a lot nowadays).Anyone remember this / have insights into why PyCon was the launch site for Docker?

toomuchtodo · Accepted Answer

I have not been involved with operationalizing Python at scale (devops/infra) for over half a decade, but I imagine because Python environment management a decade ago was incredibly painful (virtualenvs and such) and Docker solved a lot of that by giving you the equivalent of a binary build. What better audience for launching the tool? Total game changer to be able to build a container from your project and fire it up on dev workstations and the cloud.

glaucon · Answer

Well it was a Lightning talk which, at least at those pycons I have attended, can be about anything the speaker wishes to talk about. Perhaps dotCloud had significant mind share amongst Python users ? I don't have any recollection of that but it's possibly another reason.

yen223 · Answer

1. Python was and still is popular2. Docker solved a lot of problems related to Python's deployment story.

theli0nheart · Answer

I was in the audience and was a heavy Python user at the time.
As another commenter mentioned, this was during a round of several lightning talks. These talks generally can be about pretty much anything. I don't remember the others, but I definitely remembered this one.
At the time, dotCloud had oriented itself as a PaaS that also had first-class support for Python (Heroku was still very Ruby/Rails-focused), so it makes sense that they'd want to show off what they were building at a conference with Python developers.