The Power in a Name

My full name is Mark Allen Miller. You can find my profile on LinkedIn under my full name https://www.linkedin.com/in/markallenmiller/. I went to college with two other Mark Millers. One of them also had the same middle initial as me so my name is not the most unique name in the world. My dad’s name is Siegfried Miller. At the age of 18, because he could “change the world”, he changed his last name from Mueller to Miller and yep, he doesn’t have a middle name. My grandfather’s name is Karl Mueller. His Austrian surname, prior to immigrating to the US in 1950, was Müller with an umlaut which is a mark ( ¨ ) used over a vowel to indicate a different vowel quality. Interesting trivia you might say, but what does this have to do with Docker?

Well, Docker originally had the name dotCloud. According to wikipedia “Docker represents an evolution of dotCloud’s proprietary technology, which is itself built on earlier open-source projects such as Cloudlets.” I had never even heard of Cloudlets until I wrote this blog.

Docker containers have names also. These names give us humans something a little more interesting to work with instead of the typical container id such as 648f7f486b24. The name of a container can be used to identify a running instance of an image, but it can also be used in most commands in place of the container id.