4 ms·

I agree 100%. While the tech in Docker is great, it alone can't be easily monetized. The real value comes from things like DockerHub, and getting people to buy

by p8952 11y ago

I agree 100%. While the tech in Docker is great, it alone can't be easily monetized. The real value comes from things like DockerHub, and getting people to buy into the whole ecosystem.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Which is probably why people were concerned about Docker's expansion into the clustering and orchestration markets, even if from a business perspective those are their only real holdouts to avoid commodification. The base Docker is easy to replace if the project goes out of hand, the services around it are trickier.
- hosh 11y ago
  There are several tech streams converging there. A bigger chunk is the space that Mesos and Kubernetes occupy. And to be fair, I suspect the Docker folks were thinking less about clustering and orchestration so much as: (1) clustering and orchestration still sucks; (2) people want as good of an experience using docker as they do when spanning across multiple nodes; (3) let's make clustering and orchestration less sucky and use the 'Docker Way'[1] [1] 'Docker Way' is a pointer to the fuzzy, difficult-to-verbalize thing that Docker enables, namely in packaging.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    clustering and orchestration still sucks I don't see that changing until we get proper single-system imaging, location transparency, process and IPC migration, process checkpointing and RPC-based servers for representing network and local resources as objects (be they file-based or other) in our mainstream systems. These things only really caught on in the HPC and scientific computing spaces, where you've had distributed task managers and workload balancers like HTCondor and MOSIX for decades. They've also been research interests in systems like Amoeba and Sprite, but sans that, not much. The likes of Mesos, the Mesosphere ecosystem with Marathon and Chronos, and Docker Swarm bring only the primitive parts of the whole picture. Some other stuff they can half-ass by (ab)using file system features like subvolumes, but overall I don't see them improving on all the suck.
    - nitrogen 11y ago
      I ran an OpenMOSIX cluster as a hobby. The alternative was Beowulf (the meme of the day was "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things"). It seems the mainstream server industry has moved to more isolation rather than more interconnectedness, which is probably better for most public-facing systems.
      - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
        Isolation is orthogonal to what I listed. MOSIX has decent sandboxing. I don't know about Linux-PMI or OpenMOSIX, though. They died off years ago anyway.
hosh 11y ago
Two of the things I'd love to see is having the image format be: (1) Open standards (and I'm hearing things moving in that direction) (2) Content-addressability, so that images can be stored on IPFS. Point (2) really plays the "packaging" rather than the "containment" aspect. I'm not really thinking about Docker Hub or any proprietary services like that. There's a project put out by Chef (formerly Opscode) called Omnibus. It allows you to build a monolithic the package, complete with all the library dependencies and such. Chef Server is distributed with that monolithic omnibus. What had happened was that various library dependencies would cause problems with the various systems that needed to come together. It was easier to specify the precise version of the components needed. (But it also put the onus of security fixes on Chef). That is the real problem that Docker solves. Packaging. It enables a kind of shift in thinking that's difficult to put into words. People say "light-weight containers' or whatever, but none of that really nails the conceptual shift that Docker enables. In about five years, it'll become obvious the way 'cloud' is obvious now, and non-obvious back in 2005.
- davexunit 11y ago
  Omnibus is a step backwards. Every monolithic Omnibus package has its own copy of each dependency, so you end up with duplicated binaries. You can no longer patch a library system-wide, you have to figure out which Omnibus packages have the library and rebuild it with the patched version. Package management was invented to deduplicate files across the system, and people seem to have given up on that. You say that Docker solves this problem, but it doesn't really. Sure, it creates isolated runtime environments that avoid the clashes you described, but it only further obscures the problem of system-wide deduplication of dependencies. The real solution here is better package managers, such as GNU Guix, that can easily handle multiple programs on the same machine that require different versions of the same dependencies whilst also deduplicating common files system-wide. Once such a foundation is in place, a container system no longer needs to deal with disk images, it can just bind-mount the needed software builds from the host into the container thereby deduplicating files across all containers, too. Omnibus and Docker are papering over problems, not solving them.
  - ecnahc515 11y ago

by p8952 11y ago

I agree 100%. While the tech in Docker is great, it alone can't be easily monetized. The real value comes from things like DockerHub, and getting people to buy into the whole ecosystem.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

Which is probably why people were concerned about Docker's expansion into the clustering and orchestration markets, even if from a business perspective those are their only real holdouts to avoid commodification. The base Docker is easy to replace if the project goes out of hand, the services around it are trickier.

hosh 11y ago
There are several tech streams converging there. A bigger chunk is the space that Mesos and Kubernetes occupy. And to be fair, I suspect the Docker folks were thinking less about clustering and orchestration so much as: (1) clustering and orchestration still sucks; (2) people want as good of an experience using docker as they do when spanning across multiple nodes; (3) let's make clustering and orchestration less sucky and use the 'Docker Way'[1] [1] 'Docker Way' is a pointer to the fuzzy, difficult-to-verbalize thing that Docker enables, namely in packaging.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  clustering and orchestration still sucks I don't see that changing until we get proper single-system imaging, location transparency, process and IPC migration, process checkpointing and RPC-based servers for representing network and local resources as objects (be they file-based or other) in our mainstream systems. These things only really caught on in the HPC and scientific computing spaces, where you've had distributed task managers and workload balancers like HTCondor and MOSIX for decades. They've also been research interests in systems like Amoeba and Sprite, but sans that, not much. The likes of Mesos, the Mesosphere ecosystem with Marathon and Chronos, and Docker Swarm bring only the primitive parts of the whole picture. Some other stuff they can half-ass by (ab)using file system features like subvolumes, but overall I don't see them improving on all the suck.
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    I ran an OpenMOSIX cluster as a hobby. The alternative was Beowulf (the meme of the day was "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things"). It seems the mainstream server industry has moved to more isolation rather than more interconnectedness, which is probably better for most public-facing systems.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      Isolation is orthogonal to what I listed. MOSIX has decent sandboxing. I don't know about Linux-PMI or OpenMOSIX, though. They died off years ago anyway.

hosh 11y ago

Two of the things I'd love to see is having the image format be: (1) Open standards (and I'm hearing things moving in that direction) (2) Content-addressability, so that images can be stored on IPFS. Point (2) really plays the "packaging" rather than the "containment" aspect. I'm not really thinking about Docker Hub or any proprietary services like that. There's a project put out by Chef (formerly Opscode) called Omnibus. It allows you to build a monolithic the package, complete with all the library dependencies and such. Chef Server is distributed with that monolithic omnibus. What had happened was that various library dependencies would cause problems with the various systems that needed to come together. It was easier to specify the precise version of the components needed. (But it also put the onus of security fixes on Chef). That is the real problem that Docker solves. Packaging. It enables a kind of shift in thinking that's difficult to put into words. People say "light-weight containers' or whatever, but none of that really nails the conceptual shift that Docker enables. In about five years, it'll become obvious the way 'cloud' is obvious now, and non-obvious back in 2005.

davexunit 11y ago
Omnibus is a step backwards. Every monolithic Omnibus package has its own copy of each dependency, so you end up with duplicated binaries. You can no longer patch a library system-wide, you have to figure out which Omnibus packages have the library and rebuild it with the patched version. Package management was invented to deduplicate files across the system, and people seem to have given up on that. You say that Docker solves this problem, but it doesn't really. Sure, it creates isolated runtime environments that avoid the clashes you described, but it only further obscures the problem of system-wide deduplication of dependencies. The real solution here is better package managers, such as GNU Guix, that can easily handle multiple programs on the same machine that require different versions of the same dependencies whilst also deduplicating common files system-wide. Once such a foundation is in place, a container system no longer needs to deal with disk images, it can just bind-mount the needed software builds from the host into the container thereby deduplicating files across all containers, too. Omnibus and Docker are papering over problems, not solving them.
- ecnahc515 11y ago