The next wave of innovation started with software virtualization with the use of containerization technology. Though not new, software virtualization started to get serious traction when it became easier to start adopting through tools. Docker was an early pioneer in this space in order to make software virtualization available to general IT professionals.
Solomon Hykes started dotCloud in 2010 and renamed it Docker in 2013. Software virtualization became possible due to advances in technology to provide namespace, filesystem, and processes isolation while still using the same kernel running in a bare-metal environment or in a virtual machine.
Software virtualization using containers provides better resource utilization compared to running multiple virtual machines. This leads to 30% to 40% effective resource utilization. Usually, a virtual machine takes seconds to minutes to initialize, whereas containerization shares the same kernel space, so the start up time is a lot quicker than it is with a virtual machine.
As a matter of fact, Google used software virtualization at a very large scale and used containerization for close to 10 years. This revealed the existence of their project, known as Borg. When Google published a research paper in 2015 in the EuroSys conference (https://goo.gl/Ez99hu) about its approach in managing data centers using containerization technology, it piqued interest among many technologists and, at the very same time, Docker exploded in popularity during 2014 and 2015, which made software virtualization simple enough to use.
One of the main benefits of software virtualization (also known as containerization) was to eliminate the dependency problem for a particular piece of software. For example, the Linux glibc is the main building block library, and there are hundreds of libraries that have dependencies on a particular version of glibc. We could build a Docker container that has a particular version of glibc, and it could run on a machine that has a later version of glibc. Normally, these kinds of deep dependencies have a very complex way of maintaining two different software stacks that have been built using different versions of glibc, but containers made this very simple. Docker is credited for making a simple user interface that made software packaging easy and accessible to developers.
Software virtualization made it possible to run different monolithic applications that can run within the same hardware (bare metal) or within the same virtual machine. This also led to the birth of smaller services (a complete business function) being packaged as independent software units. This is when the era of microservices started.