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I think when it comes to containers HN has been guilty of a shocking lack of scrutiny and unilaterally hyping Docker. For example Docker was based on LXC till

by throw2016 10y ago

I think when it comes to containers HN has been guilty of a shocking lack of scrutiny and unilaterally hyping Docker. For example Docker was based on LXC till 0.9 but was so successful in hype and misdirection of the project it's based on that till today most commentators here do not seem to have a proper idea of the LXC project and whatever ideas they have are negative. How did this come to be? I don't know how healthy it is for open source if the HN community lets VC funded projects essentially hijack open source projects in this way and allow misconceptions to grow about them. For the record LXC has always been a full scale container manager and was and remains a much simpler way to use containers than Docker. Most of the big problems holding back containers like security, isolation, multi-tenancy are kernel side and not container manager side or ecosystem side and will be solved kernel side. Similarly most of the features of containers that are usable today are also thanks to kernel side. Yet the folks who work on kernel namespaces, aufs, overlayfs and other container used technologies receive no rewards or even recognition while companies like Docker completely reliant on their work suck up the attention and hype. How is this sustainable? How many know the author of Aufs or Overlayfs? How much support have these projects received and how do these projects sustain themselves. How many know that cgroups were not namespaced, the issues this created for containers and that they recently got namespaced? How many know about the fantastic advantages but also pitfalls of user namespaces? Isn't this the kind of 'container discussion' we should we having on HN instead of Docker or vendor focussed discussions? And thanks to the lack of scrutiny, Dockers complex use case of containers has passed unexamined and worse been conflated to containers. This has only increased technical debt for users just stepping in and runs the risk of putting users off containers due to the inherent complexity.

tlrobinson 10y ago
Docker is a case where "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". Yes, LXC and cgroups and aufs and overlayfs and whatever else do a lot of the heavy lifting, but Docker glued it all together in a way that was approachable by any developer, not just Linux geeks. I remember briefly looking into LXC ~6 years ago and being totally lost. Then Docker came along with a simple command line interface and growing repository of images. If you want to be popular among developers, the "hello world" developer experience should be extremely simple. See: Stripe, Twilio, Docker, GitHub, etc. That said, I do think it's too bad that the Docker client/daemon are the lowest-level building block most people are interacting with. It doesn't seem to follow the Unix philosophy of doing one thing well.
- luca_ing 10y ago
  > but Docker glued it all together in a way that was approachable by any developer, not just Linux geeks. > I remember briefly looking into LXC ~6 years ago and being totally lost. Then Docker came along with a simple command line interface and growing repository of images. I'm not trying to discount your experience in any way, but, remarkably, my impression of Docker was exactly the opposite. I personally find LXC to be very plain, simple and easy to understand, whereas docker seems intimidatingly opaque and confusing. But then again, I am a Linux geek :-)
- eeZah7Ux 10y ago
  > LXC and cgroups and aufs and overlayfs and whatever else do a lot of the heavy lifting, but Docker glued it all together For being just glue, Docker has an unjustifiably large code base, it's quite opaque and a lot of stuff to learn if you want to go beyond "hello world" If a bash script can do the same (admittedly, using btrfs) using 100 lines of code something is wrong^W hyped up. https://github.com/p8952/bocker https://github.com/p8952/bocker
ex_amazon_sde 10y ago
> HN has been guilty of shocking lack of scrutiny and unilaterally hyping Docker Spot on. It's sad how often people behind code that does the real work (LXC, Overlayfs and many more) get overlooked, while marketing-fueled operations get all the glory. It's also worrying to see that people driving technical decisions are so easily swayed by hype and fail to investigate what's under the hood.

tlrobinson 10y ago

Docker is a case where "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". Yes, LXC and cgroups and aufs and overlayfs and whatever else do a lot of the heavy lifting, but Docker glued it all together in a way that was approachable by any developer, not just Linux geeks. I remember briefly looking into LXC ~6 years ago and being totally lost. Then Docker came along with a simple command line interface and growing repository of images. If you want to be popular among developers, the "hello world" developer experience should be extremely simple. See: Stripe, Twilio, Docker, GitHub, etc. That said, I do think it's too bad that the Docker client/daemon are the lowest-level building block most people are interacting with. It doesn't seem to follow the Unix philosophy of doing one thing well.

luca_ing 10y ago
> but Docker glued it all together in a way that was approachable by any developer, not just Linux geeks. > I remember briefly looking into LXC ~6 years ago and being totally lost. Then Docker came along with a simple command line interface and growing repository of images. I'm not trying to discount your experience in any way, but, remarkably, my impression of Docker was exactly the opposite. I personally find LXC to be very plain, simple and easy to understand, whereas docker seems intimidatingly opaque and confusing. But then again, I am a Linux geek :-)
eeZah7Ux 10y ago
> LXC and cgroups and aufs and overlayfs and whatever else do a lot of the heavy lifting, but Docker glued it all together For being just glue, Docker has an unjustifiably large code base, it's quite opaque and a lot of stuff to learn if you want to go beyond "hello world" If a bash script can do the same (admittedly, using btrfs) using 100 lines of code something is wrong^W hyped up. https://github.com/p8952/bocker https://github.com/p8952/bocker

ex_amazon_sde 10y ago

> HN has been guilty of shocking lack of scrutiny and unilaterally hyping Docker Spot on. It's sad how often people behind code that does the real work (LXC, Overlayfs and many more) get overlooked, while marketing-fueled operations get all the glory. It's also worrying to see that people driving technical decisions are so easily swayed by hype and fail to investigate what's under the hood.