8 ms·

Carina – High-Performance, Instant-On Docker Containers

118 points by eddywashere 11y ago

whalesalad 11y ago
At first glance this looks incredible but what's with the naming of a "segment" ???
- wmf 11y ago
  This is a concept that doesn't even exist in most other systems, so there isn't an agreed name for it (we call it a "slice" in Spyre). It's similar to a Kubernetes "pod" but not quite.
  - jnoller 11y ago
    Exactly - we really struggled with this. A node (for example, when doing a Docker info when having $SWARM hosts) implies to the user physical isolation. As a distributed systems nerd, I pushed for "anything that doesn't make a contract it's on a different machine". Segment, slice, pod, chunk, block - something other than implying the isolation and therefore fault tolerance of the overall system. https://getcarina.com/docs/faq/ https://getcarina.com/docs/faq/ has more
    - whalesalad 11y ago
      This level abstraction seems unnecessary. We need to just let-go of the concept of physical or virtual hosts. A machine should boot and join a cluster, advertising its capabilities (ssd drives, gpu's, enhanced networking, it's availability zone or region, etc...) and you should never need to think about that stuff, period. I don't care how many devices/segments/nodes/slices/dynos/widgets are in my cluster. I care that I have X GB of total memory and Y cpu's. I want to check a box to make an app or service highly available (on more than one node, and in more than one zone) and Ronco™ set it and forget it. Everything else is just noise. I love the ideas behind Kubernetes and Fleet/CoreOS (and this) but everyone is SO excited about these low level technologies that have yet to be composed into beautiful experiences. A tweet from Kelsey Hightower sums it up perfectly: It's going to be nearly impossible for people to evaluate and chose a container management platform during the gold rush. https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/659182022410305536 https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/65918202241030553...
      - jnoller 11y ago
        I actually completely agree, and that's where I want to head with Carina. That user experience is the end-game.
      - tbronchain 11y ago
        Absolutely agree with that. We released yesterday a project called Hypernetes[1], which has been designed to solve the "I care that I have X GB of total memory and Y cpu's. I want to check a box to make an app or service highly available" problem. [1]: http://hypernetes.com http://hypernetes.com
      - nevalau 11y ago
        Totally agreed with this and that was also our vision when we started to create Kontena (https://github.com/kontena/kontena https://github.com/kontena/kontena)
callahad 11y ago
This looks fun. Any word on ballpark pricing or the duration of the beta? (or at least a lower bound on anticipated pricing -- will there be plans that are suitable for hobbyists who are otherwise on DO's $5-10/mo tier.)
- phymata 11y ago
  https://getcarina.com/docs/faq#how-long-will-carina-be-free-when-you-start-charging-what-will-it-cost https://getcarina.com/docs/faq#how-long-will-carina-be-free-...
beefsack 11y ago
People using stupid captioned images in their blog posts and technical announcements are a real turn off for me; I'm not sure if people are trying to be funny or edgy but it comes off really lame and childish. Feels like being in one of the Reddit default subs.
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  Eh, the corporate world is bland and grey. I'm glad if a company does something different.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- whalesalad 11y ago
  AFAIK this is how Heroku works. Your app is running via lxc on a host next to a billion other ones.
knite 11y ago
How does this compare to Joyent Triton?
- herpityderpity 11y ago
  Poorly.
  - abrookewood 11y ago
    Explanation required ...
jdub 11y ago
I'm surprised and a bit disappointed that this new platform still exposes users to the idea of a container host. In Carina lingo, you have to create a "cluster" and choose the number of "segments" in it. Joyent's Triton avoids this completely: Their whole data centre is a Docker "host", and you never have to care about it. The way it should be. (I'm not paid by Joyent, nor am I a customer -- I just like what they've done to push the model forward.)
- jnoller 11y ago
  This is honestly fantastic feedback and spot-on for the level of abstraction I want (and will) aim for. This is an early Beta, so things like this are top of mind.
  - jdub 11y ago
    Cool!
  - girvo 11y ago
    That's excellent to hear, because I believe that Docker/containers will truly take off once developers can treat them as the "highest level" of computation; ie. no hosts needed, containers are all that are worked from!
    - nzoschke 11y ago
      Containers are here to stay and almost certainly will be the new abstraction of computation. My big question is around a service like AWS Lambda. Is that not already the logical conclusion of container based computation? If magic units of computation can run instantly on demand, what more do you need? No hosts, but also no OS images, and no specific containerization tools!
      - IanCal 11y ago
        It's a massive shame that PiCloud went down as that had containerized environments, extremely fast startups and auto scaling. It was one of the few things I've used that really solved my small-scale data processing problems simply and cheaply. > If magic units of computation can run instantly on demand, what more do you need? Some control over flow, scaling and batching wrap everything up for me. Startup times for my code are non-zero even if the environment is, and adding on queues with a "batch grab" means I can scale things far more sensibly (I can cram a lot of stuff into a single matrix mul if I can pull 100 items at a time from a queue). I really, really miss picloud :(
nikolay 11y ago
This is a joke! I can't use my Rackspace account as I have 2FA enabled and Carina does not support it! I can understand a legacy app not supporting 2FA, but a brand new one - this is a fiasco! There are things that you can "leave for later", but security should be a top priority task for a cloud provider!
shabinesh 11y ago
Interesting. No luck for past one hour, I am facing a i/o timeout for any docker command. Trying to figure out.
- simonquotes 11y ago
  just checking to make sure you've been successful since? let me know how we (Carina team) can help further
haosdent 11y ago
not open source?

118 points by eddywashere 11y ago

whalesalad 11y ago

At first glance this looks incredible but what's with the naming of a "segment" ???

wmf 11y ago
This is a concept that doesn't even exist in most other systems, so there isn't an agreed name for it (we call it a "slice" in Spyre). It's similar to a Kubernetes "pod" but not quite.
- jnoller 11y ago
  Exactly - we really struggled with this. A node (for example, when doing a Docker info when having $SWARM hosts) implies to the user physical isolation. As a distributed systems nerd, I pushed for "anything that doesn't make a contract it's on a different machine". Segment, slice, pod, chunk, block - something other than implying the isolation and therefore fault tolerance of the overall system. https://getcarina.com/docs/faq/ https://getcarina.com/docs/faq/ has more
  - whalesalad 11y ago
    This level abstraction seems unnecessary. We need to just let-go of the concept of physical or virtual hosts. A machine should boot and join a cluster, advertising its capabilities (ssd drives, gpu's, enhanced networking, it's availability zone or region, etc...) and you should never need to think about that stuff, period. I don't care how many devices/segments/nodes/slices/dynos/widgets are in my cluster. I care that I have X GB of total memory and Y cpu's. I want to check a box to make an app or service highly available (on more than one node, and in more than one zone) and Ronco™ set it and forget it. Everything else is just noise. I love the ideas behind Kubernetes and Fleet/CoreOS (and this) but everyone is SO excited about these low level technologies that have yet to be composed into beautiful experiences. A tweet from Kelsey Hightower sums it up perfectly: It's going to be nearly impossible for people to evaluate and chose a container management platform during the gold rush. https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/659182022410305536 https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/65918202241030553...
    - jnoller 11y ago
      I actually completely agree, and that's where I want to head with Carina. That user experience is the end-game.
    - tbronchain 11y ago
      Absolutely agree with that. We released yesterday a project called Hypernetes[1], which has been designed to solve the "I care that I have X GB of total memory and Y cpu's. I want to check a box to make an app or service highly available" problem. [1]: http://hypernetes.com http://hypernetes.com
    - nevalau 11y ago
      Totally agreed with this and that was also our vision when we started to create Kontena (https://github.com/kontena/kontena https://github.com/kontena/kontena)

callahad 11y ago

This looks fun. Any word on ballpark pricing or the duration of the beta? (or at least a lower bound on anticipated pricing -- will there be plans that are suitable for hobbyists who are otherwise on DO's $5-10/mo tier.)

phymata 11y ago
https://getcarina.com/docs/faq#how-long-will-carina-be-free-when-you-start-charging-what-will-it-cost https://getcarina.com/docs/faq#how-long-will-carina-be-free-...

beefsack 11y ago

People using stupid captioned images in their blog posts and technical announcements are a real turn off for me; I'm not sure if people are trying to be funny or edgy but it comes off really lame and childish. Feels like being in one of the Reddit default subs.

voltagex_ 11y ago
Eh, the corporate world is bland and grey. I'm glad if a company does something different.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
whalesalad 11y ago
AFAIK this is how Heroku works. Your app is running via lxc on a host next to a billion other ones.

knite 11y ago

How does this compare to Joyent Triton?

herpityderpity 11y ago
Poorly.
- abrookewood 11y ago
  Explanation required ...

jdub 11y ago

I'm surprised and a bit disappointed that this new platform still exposes users to the idea of a container host. In Carina lingo, you have to create a "cluster" and choose the number of "segments" in it. Joyent's Triton avoids this completely: Their whole data centre is a Docker "host", and you never have to care about it. The way it should be. (I'm not paid by Joyent, nor am I a customer -- I just like what they've done to push the model forward.)

jnoller 11y ago
This is honestly fantastic feedback and spot-on for the level of abstraction I want (and will) aim for. This is an early Beta, so things like this are top of mind.
- jdub 11y ago
  Cool!
- girvo 11y ago
  That's excellent to hear, because I believe that Docker/containers will truly take off once developers can treat them as the "highest level" of computation; ie. no hosts needed, containers are all that are worked from!
  - nzoschke 11y ago
    Containers are here to stay and almost certainly will be the new abstraction of computation. My big question is around a service like AWS Lambda. Is that not already the logical conclusion of container based computation? If magic units of computation can run instantly on demand, what more do you need? No hosts, but also no OS images, and no specific containerization tools!
    - IanCal 11y ago
      It's a massive shame that PiCloud went down as that had containerized environments, extremely fast startups and auto scaling. It was one of the few things I've used that really solved my small-scale data processing problems simply and cheaply. > If magic units of computation can run instantly on demand, what more do you need? Some control over flow, scaling and batching wrap everything up for me. Startup times for my code are non-zero even if the environment is, and adding on queues with a "batch grab" means I can scale things far more sensibly (I can cram a lot of stuff into a single matrix mul if I can pull 100 items at a time from a queue). I really, really miss picloud :(

nikolay 11y ago

This is a joke! I can't use my Rackspace account as I have 2FA enabled and Carina does not support it! I can understand a legacy app not supporting 2FA, but a brand new one - this is a fiasco! There are things that you can "leave for later", but security should be a top priority task for a cloud provider!

shabinesh 11y ago

Interesting. No luck for past one hour, I am facing a i/o timeout for any docker command. Trying to figure out.

simonquotes 11y ago
just checking to make sure you've been successful since? let me know how we (Carina team) can help further

haosdent 11y ago

not open source?