3 ms·

I'm not sure I understand the problem. Whatever containerization project you were building on top of Docker, it is just as viable today as yesterday. No option

by shykes 10y ago

I'm not sure I understand the problem. Whatever containerization project you were building on top of Docker, it is just as viable today as yesterday. No option has been removed - if anything there are now more options available to you. All new versions of Docker remain backwards-compatible with previous versions. And components of Docker which were previously not available standalone, now are. What exactly would you like Docker to do, that we're not currently doing?

curun1r 10y ago
What you're missing is the ecosystem vs platform distinction. A platform is yours to control and an ecosystem has a life of its own. You're right that everything that was possible still is. But docker, as a term, developed in ways not controlled by you. It took on a meaning that's probably more limited than you'd like. And it developed momentum that can't be stopped or diverted by a marketing strategy and a press release from Docker, Inc. You're not the first company that's had to deal with this. To me, it's similar to Google's failed attempts to keep people from using their name as a verb. You're both companies that has a wildly successful initial product that got associated with your company's name and that hindered attempts to branch out from that initial offering. But the more you try to repurpose the term to refer to your broader offering rather than the narrower base layer that it started out as, the more you create problems for those of us that have spent a lot of time and effort selling your approach within our organizations. Not everyone is sold on containerization and we (your advocates) have people that will pounce on any confusion as a way to push back. Decision-makers in organizations are often surprisingly non-technical. Imagine if there were a company behind email. And that company wanted to make money selling add-on services like encryption and mailing list management. So it decided to call the base email layer libsmtpd and repurpose the term email to mean the broader platform offering. Now imagine you've got to explain this change to your elderly mother who's just gotten over the hump and gotten comfortable with sending email and referring to email correctly. That's kinda the position you're putting us in.
- hjacobs 10y ago
  Very well said!
- shykes 10y ago
  I understand what you're saying. And you would be 100% correct if everyone shared your definition of Docker as a tiny container runtime and nothing else. But that is not at all the case. There are conflicting narratives of what Docker is and isn't. And where you see the mystical forces of brand destiny deciding which narrative will win - I have seen the kitchen where the branding sausage is made. And believe me there is nothing magical about it. Some vendors want you to believe Docker is a component, so they spend money in marketing programs and suddenly you're hearing through various channels that Docker is a component. We in turn want you to know that Docker is a product, we invest in telling you that story, and here we are. The difference is that we invented Docker. We understand its future potential and control its design and trademark. Our competitors don't. So I'm sorry that you have a different definition of Docker than the people who invented Docker. But just like Google decides what Google is - Docker decides what Docker is.
  - orf 10y ago
    If Google decided to pivot to a lunch delivery service and shut their search offerings, people would still 'google' things.
  - curun1r 10y ago
    I'm sorry you feel that way. For what it's worth, my notion of what Docker is comes from having run it in production since before the transition away from LXC. I ran a small team inside a relatively large company (8000 employees, $25B mkt cap) and we largely had control over our own ops. We ran into a lot of early adopter pains, but the benefits definitely outweighed the pain. I was also in various architecture groups that made decisions for the larger products at the company. I was always honest about the drawbacks, but I pushed for limited exploratory projects using Docker to try to slowly move ops in that direction. I had a lot of opposition from ops folks that never felt the pain of the developer experience and worried that Docker was an encroachment on their fiefdom (GoT had nothing on our internal politics :-) Slowly, we (I wasn't the only Docker supporter at the company) made progress. We set up a Quay private registry server so that, at least, teams could begin to experiment. And when I met your team at re:invent and heard that you were developing your own offering for private registry, I convinced them to switch. The first-party argument was easy to make and the company didn't really quibble about sub-7-figure software purchases. I ended up leaving that company last year, so your current direction isn't really making my life harder, but had I stayed,it would be. If you want to be explicit in your targeting of a different market segment from the kind of early adopter that I am/was, that's fine. But don't accuse me of having my view shaped by competitors' marketing. That's a highly revisionist view of your own history. Because when I got on the Docker bandwagon, the reality absolutely matched what I'm describing. Docker was the base layer and a prefix added to related product offerings. But it wasn't a platform like you're describing. That seems like it's changed now, which would've really screwed me in trying to push Docker at my previous employer.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

by shykes 10y ago

curun1r 10y ago

What you're missing is the ecosystem vs platform distinction. A platform is yours to control and an ecosystem has a life of its own. You're right that everything that was possible still is. But docker, as a term, developed in ways not controlled by you. It took on a meaning that's probably more limited than you'd like. And it developed momentum that can't be stopped or diverted by a marketing strategy and a press release from Docker, Inc. You're not the first company that's had to deal with this. To me, it's similar to Google's failed attempts to keep people from using their name as a verb. You're both companies that has a wildly successful initial product that got associated with your company's name and that hindered attempts to branch out from that initial offering. But the more you try to repurpose the term to refer to your broader offering rather than the narrower base layer that it started out as, the more you create problems for those of us that have spent a lot of time and effort selling your approach within our organizations. Not everyone is sold on containerization and we (your advocates) have people that will pounce on any confusion as a way to push back. Decision-makers in organizations are often surprisingly non-technical. Imagine if there were a company behind email. And that company wanted to make money selling add-on services like encryption and mailing list management. So it decided to call the base email layer libsmtpd and repurpose the term email to mean the broader platform offering. Now imagine you've got to explain this change to your elderly mother who's just gotten over the hump and gotten comfortable with sending email and referring to email correctly. That's kinda the position you're putting us in.

hjacobs 10y ago
Very well said!
shykes 10y ago
I understand what you're saying. And you would be 100% correct if everyone shared your definition of Docker as a tiny container runtime and nothing else. But that is not at all the case. There are conflicting narratives of what Docker is and isn't. And where you see the mystical forces of brand destiny deciding which narrative will win - I have seen the kitchen where the branding sausage is made. And believe me there is nothing magical about it. Some vendors want you to believe Docker is a component, so they spend money in marketing programs and suddenly you're hearing through various channels that Docker is a component. We in turn want you to know that Docker is a product, we invest in telling you that story, and here we are. The difference is that we invented Docker. We understand its future potential and control its design and trademark. Our competitors don't. So I'm sorry that you have a different definition of Docker than the people who invented Docker. But just like Google decides what Google is - Docker decides what Docker is.
- orf 10y ago
  If Google decided to pivot to a lunch delivery service and shut their search offerings, people would still 'google' things.
- curun1r 10y ago
  I'm sorry you feel that way. For what it's worth, my notion of what Docker is comes from having run it in production since before the transition away from LXC. I ran a small team inside a relatively large company (8000 employees, $25B mkt cap) and we largely had control over our own ops. We ran into a lot of early adopter pains, but the benefits definitely outweighed the pain. I was also in various architecture groups that made decisions for the larger products at the company. I was always honest about the drawbacks, but I pushed for limited exploratory projects using Docker to try to slowly move ops in that direction. I had a lot of opposition from ops folks that never felt the pain of the developer experience and worried that Docker was an encroachment on their fiefdom (GoT had nothing on our internal politics :-) Slowly, we (I wasn't the only Docker supporter at the company) made progress. We set up a Quay private registry server so that, at least, teams could begin to experiment. And when I met your team at re:invent and heard that you were developing your own offering for private registry, I convinced them to switch. The first-party argument was easy to make and the company didn't really quibble about sub-7-figure software purchases. I ended up leaving that company last year, so your current direction isn't really making my life harder, but had I stayed,it would be. If you want to be explicit in your targeting of a different market segment from the kind of early adopter that I am/was, that's fine. But don't accuse me of having my view shaped by competitors' marketing. That's a highly revisionist view of your own history. Because when I got on the Docker bandwagon, the reality absolutely matched what I'm describing. Docker was the base layer and a prefix added to related product offerings. But it wasn't a platform like you're describing. That seems like it's changed now, which would've really screwed me in trying to push Docker at my previous employer.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]