May 6, 2013. I woke up with a groggy mind and the weight of another week’s worth of code reviews and meetings. Little did I know that this would be one of those mornings where everything changed.

I had been working in ops for just over two years by then. My days were filled with setting up servers, configuring firewalls, and managing software deployments—mostly using a mix of Bash scripts and some custom Python glue. We were still heavy on monolithic applications running on a single box, and I was starting to feel the pain points. Every change felt like a potential disaster waiting to happen.

Then, late last year, Docker had announced their container technology. It seemed promising—something that could help us decouple our applications from the underlying infrastructure. But we were still trying to figure out how to integrate it into our existing environment.

Today, I decided to finally dive in. I fired up my laptop and started Googling “Docker + [our stack]” hoping for some guidance. The results were overwhelming but also encouraging. There was a whole community of people like me who had already made the leap.

The first thing I did was install Docker on our staging environment. It took about 10 minutes, which felt like an eternity compared to setting up virtual machines. Once it was running, I quickly spun up a few containers and deployed a small application we were working on. The simplicity of starting with a docker run command was thrilling.

However, as the morning went on, reality started to set in. We had no orchestration or cluster management tools at all. Our deployment processes relied heavily on manual steps and custom scripts. I knew we needed to think bigger than just running containers locally. That’s when CoreOS came into my radar.

CoreOS was still pretty new back then, but their focus on secure boot, container runtime, and fleet (their distributed system tool) caught my attention. I spent the afternoon reading about their project and how it could fit with Docker. I imagined a future where we had a fleet of machines, each running containers for our different services.

But as night fell, I was still grappling with questions: How would we manage updates to these containers? Would we have enough resources to run everything in containers? And most importantly, did everyone even want to go down this path?

The next day, we gathered the team to discuss Docker and CoreOS. The reaction was mixed. Some were excited by the potential of containerization, while others were skeptical about the complexity it might bring. I remember the tension as people shared their concerns—what if a container escape? What about performance overhead?

We decided to take small steps. We set up a testing environment on our staging cluster and started migrating some smaller services over to containers. It was slow going at first, but each success gave us more confidence.

As time went by, I found myself increasingly drawn into the world of Docker and containerization. The industry was buzzing with excitement around microservices and DevOps practices. Companies like Netflix and Amazon were already using these technologies in production, sharing their learnings and struggles.

By 2014, Kubernetes had been announced by Google. That felt like a game-changer. Suddenly, managing multiple containers across several machines didn’t seem as daunting anymore. We started exploring how we could use Kubernetes to orchestrate our growing number of containerized services.

Looking back, those early mornings spent with Docker and CoreOS were the beginning of a significant shift in how I thought about software deployment and infrastructure management. The technology was raw but promising. The community was small yet passionate. And the journey ahead would be long, filled with both successes and failures.

That morning, I woke up to containers, not just as a tool, but as part of a broader movement that would change our approach to building and deploying software forever.