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> Nobody who built containers before Docker came along shipped an operating system in the image. Now we have gigabytes of Ubuntu alongside nginx thanks to Docke

by tachion 11y ago

> Nobody who built containers before Docker came along shipped an operating system in the image. Now we have gigabytes of Ubuntu alongside nginx thanks to Docker. Cool. This couldnt be more false - other systems had containers capabilities for years now (FreeBSD Jails, Solaris Zones, IBM LPAR's, Linux OpenVZ and so on) and since forever it was done in a way of running another full OS inside a container. Stripping that down to single processes was possible and done by some people but rarely, because it was relatively hard (since it often required hand-crafting the 'packages', hunting down single libs and their requirements using ldd and the like). I myself was running both full OS jail containers on FreeBSD and stripped down single process/service jails more than 10 years ago.

jsmthrowaway 11y ago
As I told Solomon, this confusion is due to muddying of the term. I'm connected to the Google school of thought on this (where basically all the billions of containers in prod are `FROM scratch`, because they did the work you call hard to ship a process as a container), whereas jails are the other school of thought. I would contend that they are different enough to deserve different terms, and this thread of correcting what I meant, and explaining jails to me even though I would think it pretty clear I understand them, is evidence enough. We called those jails when FreeBSD was carrying that torch. I never once heard them called containers until now. That is my point. Docker is not for the jail case. If it were, it would look like OpenVZ and come with completely different architecture and management tooling. It's for deploying artifacts to prod, and my entire point is that starting from `FROM ubuntu` for even a Go binary has muddled this picture irreversibly. Now I have to have this argument, which makes no sense, because we now take it as fact that containers and jails are the same thing, and anyone who says otherwise deserves to have very basic things explained to them carefully and rather condescendingly. This reply applies to everyone who is calling me wrong. I spent last summer employed by CoreOS, have worked on Google Borg, and spent the first half of my career on the production artifact toolchain. I'm not just farting into the breeze here with my two personal servers and opinions.

by tachion 11y ago

jsmthrowaway 11y ago

As I told Solomon, this confusion is due to muddying of the term. I'm connected to the Google school of thought on this (where basically all the billions of containers in prod are `FROM scratch`, because they did the work you call hard to ship a process as a container), whereas jails are the other school of thought. I would contend that they are different enough to deserve different terms, and this thread of correcting what I meant, and explaining jails to me even though I would think it pretty clear I understand them, is evidence enough. We called those jails when FreeBSD was carrying that torch. I never once heard them called containers until now. That is my point. Docker is not for the jail case. If it were, it would look like OpenVZ and come with completely different architecture and management tooling. It's for deploying artifacts to prod, and my entire point is that starting from `FROM ubuntu` for even a Go binary has muddled this picture irreversibly. Now I have to have this argument, which makes no sense, because we now take it as fact that containers and jails are the same thing, and anyone who says otherwise deserves to have very basic things explained to them carefully and rather condescendingly. This reply applies to everyone who is calling me wrong. I spent last summer employed by CoreOS, have worked on Google Borg, and spent the first half of my career on the production artifact toolchain. I'm not just farting into the breeze here with my two personal servers and opinions.