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We solve all of those use cases in our cluster management system of which Docker is a key enabling component, except for point 5, though we do have other compon

by tinco 11y ago

We solve all of those use cases in our cluster management system of which Docker is a key enabling component, except for point 5, though we do have other components that require multiple steps to provision. I bet we could run Hadoop if we needed it. It's easy to point at Docker and say it's a trivial wrapper around some technologies that have been around for years and call everyone crazy for buying into the 'Docker is going to change the (sysadmin) world' hype. Of course in essence it's pretty trivial, many things are. Docker, and Docker-like systems really are changing the sysadmin world. Easily formalised software environments is what this hype is about, and the fact that the Docker community isn't really looking at the stateful service problem right, doesn't mean they're not enabled by Docker either. To me, and to many 'devops' (i.e. developers rolling into sysadmin roles) Docker was eye-opening. We reduced our chef scripts by 80%, and thus our headaches by 95%. It's saving us months of ops work. If you were a seasoned sysadmin and rolling your eyes at the fact that we were rolling out application level services in the same chef codebase we were setting up our system environments with, then yeah you already were better than us. But as far as I could tell the way we used to do it really was the status quo, at least in the startup/small it business world.

sumbry 11y ago
Someone once said that the public cloud was never about virtualization but rather automation. I would contend that the container revolution we're going through now isn't really about containers but ultimately distributed system platforms. And if it changes the way many have traditionally approached problems great! My main point is that we're really just at the beginning of all of this. I'm not picking on Docker (I'm actually embracing containers) but rather pointing out that many of these next gen solutions are only tackling the basic use cases right now. While I'm excited there is so much more work left to be done. Implementing many of these solutions still requires a bunch of engineering effort and I'd like to see more turnkey solutions. The developer end is definitely getting easier and more productive but the operational end is getting more complex and still not solving some use cases everyone has. How many different ways can different companies implement HA MySQL for example?! There are tons of other platforms out there that have recognized and solved many of this class of problems for years but the Cloud and microservices are actually starting to make this worse as adoption skyrockets. Platforms are not really a new thing, we went through this with JVM Platforms a ~decade ago, Heroku style PaaS ~five years ago, and now containers + cloud today. I guess this is what progress looks like :)
- iheartmemcache 11y ago
  Ha you weren't kidding about the number of HA MySQL drop-in engine replacements out there, damn. At least most people follow the ANSI-SQL standard, which is something. I'm not being snarky, but what are the use-cases that everyone have? I'd argue authentication and authorization would be one of the few things, and it was already solved with JSR 196 like 15 years ago. It worked, had a well defined spec, and most importantly it had interop with PAM on UNIX, Kerberos, LDAP, raw db's, mixed mode, you name it. Everyone complained it was too enterprisey and no one used it, so they re-invented the wheel in the early 00s with Rails and Devise and Authlogic and a billion other non-standards. Transactions? Persistence? Java's spec took care of that too, and fairly rigorously. So I'm with 100% with you on this being a solved problem. We're making gradual progress (i.e., the option to develop in a language where the correctness of our code can be formally verified thanks to more readily available, mathematically sound type-systems) but like any society there are trends, and where there are trends you'll have the recurrence of many old things (Interpol ripping off Joy Division) and the invention of a few new things (where are often the composition of two older ideas, or the implementation of a new idea which wasn't computationally feasible previously but now is, or a concept from another industry like signal analysis or three-phase road traffic theory applied to our code-monkey'ing domain). RE: Overall progress - Microsoft is doing some fantastic things in Powershell, effectively taking concepts like package management, man pages, and the shell, extracting the best elements from each of those, and implementing them in a consistent manner. No more choosing between systemd or init.d or other holy wars. If you want to do it differently, you effectively have a standardized interface to write your new implementation against within most of the platform. Don't like ASP.NET's templating system? No problem, it's all open source, and you can swap your own in, but it's all modular so nothing will break, and your co-workers can continue working in the traditional Razor templating.
fenomas 11y ago
I'm quite new to containers, but it seems to me that Docker revolutionizes sysadmin the same way npm revolutionizes Javascript. It's not that it magically makes your problems any easier to solve, it's that it lets you declare your solution in a formal way without unstated dependencies, and then distribute your solution in a way that lets others declare a dependency on it. (More broadly I feel like this same thing has been happening in various parts of the IT landscape over the past few years, to the extent that their ought to be a name for it, if there isn't already?)

by tinco 11y ago

sumbry 11y ago

Someone once said that the public cloud was never about virtualization but rather automation. I would contend that the container revolution we're going through now isn't really about containers but ultimately distributed system platforms. And if it changes the way many have traditionally approached problems great! My main point is that we're really just at the beginning of all of this. I'm not picking on Docker (I'm actually embracing containers) but rather pointing out that many of these next gen solutions are only tackling the basic use cases right now. While I'm excited there is so much more work left to be done. Implementing many of these solutions still requires a bunch of engineering effort and I'd like to see more turnkey solutions. The developer end is definitely getting easier and more productive but the operational end is getting more complex and still not solving some use cases everyone has. How many different ways can different companies implement HA MySQL for example?! There are tons of other platforms out there that have recognized and solved many of this class of problems for years but the Cloud and microservices are actually starting to make this worse as adoption skyrockets. Platforms are not really a new thing, we went through this with JVM Platforms a ~decade ago, Heroku style PaaS ~five years ago, and now containers + cloud today. I guess this is what progress looks like :)

iheartmemcache 11y ago
Ha you weren't kidding about the number of HA MySQL drop-in engine replacements out there, damn. At least most people follow the ANSI-SQL standard, which is something. I'm not being snarky, but what are the use-cases that everyone have? I'd argue authentication and authorization would be one of the few things, and it was already solved with JSR 196 like 15 years ago. It worked, had a well defined spec, and most importantly it had interop with PAM on UNIX, Kerberos, LDAP, raw db's, mixed mode, you name it. Everyone complained it was too enterprisey and no one used it, so they re-invented the wheel in the early 00s with Rails and Devise and Authlogic and a billion other non-standards. Transactions? Persistence? Java's spec took care of that too, and fairly rigorously. So I'm with 100% with you on this being a solved problem. We're making gradual progress (i.e., the option to develop in a language where the correctness of our code can be formally verified thanks to more readily available, mathematically sound type-systems) but like any society there are trends, and where there are trends you'll have the recurrence of many old things (Interpol ripping off Joy Division) and the invention of a few new things (where are often the composition of two older ideas, or the implementation of a new idea which wasn't computationally feasible previously but now is, or a concept from another industry like signal analysis or three-phase road traffic theory applied to our code-monkey'ing domain). RE: Overall progress - Microsoft is doing some fantastic things in Powershell, effectively taking concepts like package management, man pages, and the shell, extracting the best elements from each of those, and implementing them in a consistent manner. No more choosing between systemd or init.d or other holy wars. If you want to do it differently, you effectively have a standardized interface to write your new implementation against within most of the platform. Don't like ASP.NET's templating system? No problem, it's all open source, and you can swap your own in, but it's all modular so nothing will break, and your co-workers can continue working in the traditional Razor templating.

fenomas 11y ago

I'm quite new to containers, but it seems to me that Docker revolutionizes sysadmin the same way npm revolutionizes Javascript. It's not that it magically makes your problems any easier to solve, it's that it lets you declare your solution in a formal way without unstated dependencies, and then distribute your solution in a way that lets others declare a dependency on it. (More broadly I feel like this same thing has been happening in various parts of the IT landscape over the past few years, to the extent that their ought to be a name for it, if there isn't already?)