39 ms·

Au Revoir

898 points by zapita 9y ago

nroach 9y ago
504 gateway error? edit Solomon Hykes is departing - https://twitter.com/Docker/status/979027618866520064 https://twitter.com/Docker/status/979027618866520064
- some_random 9y ago
  Same, is there a mirror?
passivepinetree 9y ago
I'm getting a 504 Gateway timeout. Is the HN hug of death really affecting such a huge site?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sciurus 9y ago
  blog.docker.com runs Wordpress, and the domain points directly at an ELB. Unless they are running some caching layer (behind that ELB but in front of their wordpress processes), they may have to scale out a lot in order to handle traffic spikes, and they may be limited in their ability to do that by DB capacity.
  - passivepinetree 9y ago
    Interesting. Thank you for the clarification!
haney 9y ago
Site appears to be down but I'm guessing the post is related to this tweet? https://twitter.com/Docker/status/979027618866520064 https://twitter.com/Docker/status/979027618866520064
- connorl33t 9y ago
  Very short blog post from Solomon with a little bit of his history at Docker, noting that the company is at the point where he can leave it to run by itself without him.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
notananthem 9y ago
504... rip
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 9y ago
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markbnj 9y ago
Finally loaded for me. Solomon Hykes is leaving the company.
Dayshine 9y ago
A founder has retired, nothing as dramatic as the title might imply.
jf 9y ago
I was able to get the page to load, here's the text of thet post: "Today I’m announcing my departure from Docker, the company I helped create ten years ago and have been building ever since. A founder’s departure is usually seen as a dramatic event. Sadly, I must report that reality is far less exciting in this case. I’ve had many roles at Docker over the years, and today I have a new, final one – as an active board member, a major shareholder and, I expect, a high maintenance Docker user. But I will no longer be part of day-to-day operations. Instead, after obsessing for so many years over my own ideas, I am rediscovering the joys of putting myself at the service of others – my friends, my family, and the brilliant entrepreneurs I’ve been lucky enough to advise and invest in over the years. Over the coming months I plan to use my experience to help them in any way I can. This transition is simply another chapter in a long story of change, growth, hard work… and a lot of luck. Ten years ago, I quit my job, returned to live with my mother in Paris and, together with my friends Kamel Founadi and Sebastien Pahl, started a company called Dotcloud. Our goal was to harness an obscure technology called containers, and use it to create what we called “tools of mass innovation”: programming tools which anyone could use. I was 24 and had no idea what I was doing. We needed a CEO, so that became my new role. Five years ago, Dotcloud reinvented itself as Docker, around a battle-hardened core of five people: Eric Bardin, Sam Alba, Jerome Petazzoni, Julien Barbier and myself. Soon growth was off the charts, and we hired an experienced CEO to help us sustain it. I was 29 and eager to do my part. Docker needed a CTO, so that became my new role. Today, as I turn 34, Docker has quietly transformed into an enterprise business with explosive revenue growth and a developer community in the millions, under the leadership of our CEO, the legendary Steve Singh. Our strategy is simple: every large enterprise in the world is preparing to migrate their applications and infrastructure to the cloud, en masse. They need a solution to do so reliably and securely, without expensive code or process changes, and without locking themselves to a single operating system or cloud. Today the only solution meeting these requirements is Docker Enterprise Edition. This puts Docker at the center of a massive growth opportunity. To take advantage of this opportunity, we need a CTO by Steve’s side with decades of experience shipping and supporting software for the largest corporations in the world. So I now have a new role: to help find that ideal CTO, provide the occasional bit of advice, and get out of the team’s way as they continue to build a juggernaut of a business. As a shareholder, I couldn’t be happier to accept this role. As a founder, of course, I have mixed emotions. When you create a company, your job is to make sure it can one day succeed without you. Then eventually that one day comes and the celebration can be bittersweet. It’s never easy for a founder to part ways with their life’s work. But I realize how incredibly lucky I am to have this problem. Most ideas never materialize. Most software goes unused. Most businesses fail in their first year. Yet here we are, one of the largest open-source communities ever assembled, collectively building software that will run on millions of computers around the world. To know that your work was meaningful, and that a vibrant community of people will continue building upon it…. can any founder ask for anything more? I want to thank from the bottom of my heart every member of the Docker team and community, past and present, for making Docker what it is today. Thanks to you, this founder’s bittersweet moment is mostly sweet. We have built something great together. I look forward to seeing where you will take it next. Happy hacking, Solomon"
danvoell 9y ago
Very well written. It has to be tough to walk away from something with as much trajectory. It also takes someone very self-aware to know when they are helping and where their talents can be better utilized.
Fenrisulfr 9y ago
Hug of death? Twitter post here: https://twitter.com/Docker/status/979027618866520064 https://twitter.com/Docker/status/979027618866520064
deleted 9y ago
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deleted 9y ago
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cryptoz 9y ago
Title should change. Sounds like Docker is shutting down permanently since the site doesn't load and the title is French for Good Bye.
- fhood 9y ago
  Haha, I clicked on it in a panick after remembering what au revoir meant.
  - coding123 9y ago
    Yeah same was about to shit my pants...
- zemo 9y ago
  I dunno, I knew what the content of the post by seeing the title and the domain on its own. People (and companies) don't say good bye in the first person when they die, since they're, uh, dead. They just go "there is ... another ... sky... walker..." and disappear.
gk1 9y ago
Another source: http://www.eweek.com/enterprise-apps/docker-founder-solomon-hykes-announces-exit-from-docker-inc http://www.eweek.com/enterprise-apps/docker-founder-solomon-...
zapita 9y ago
It looks like their blog crashed under the load... Here's the full text below. Today I’m announcing my departure from Docker, the company I helped create ten years ago and have been building ever since. A founder’s departure is usually seen as a dramatic event. Sadly, I must report that reality is far less exciting in this case. I’ve had many roles at Docker over the years, and today I have a new, final one – as an active board member, a major shareholder and, I expect, a high maintenance Docker user. But I will no longer be part of day-to-day operations. Instead, after obsessing for so many years over my own ideas, I am rediscovering the joys of putting myself at the service of others – my friends, my family, and the brilliant entrepreneurs I’ve been lucky enough to advise and invest in over the years. Over the coming months I plan to use my experience to help them in any way I can. This transition is simply another chapter in a long story of change, growth, hard work… and a lot of luck. Ten years ago, I quit my job, returned to live with my mother in Paris and, together with my friends Kamel Founadi and Sebastien Pahl, started a company called Dotcloud. Our goal was to harness an obscure technology called containers, and use it to create what we called “tools of mass innovation”: programming tools which anyone could use. I was 24 and had no idea what I was doing. We needed a CEO, so that became my new role. Five years ago, Dotcloud reinvented itself as Docker, around a battle-hardened core of five people: Eric Bardin, Sam Alba, Jerome Petazzoni, Julien Barbier and myself. Soon growth was off the charts, and we hired an experienced CEO to help us sustain it. I was 29 and eager to do my part. Docker needed a CTO, so that became my new role. Today, as I turn 34, Docker has quietly transformed into an enterprise business with explosive revenue growth and a developer community in the millions, under the leadership of our CEO, the legendary Steve Singh. Our strategy is simple: every large enterprise in the world is preparing to migrate their applications and infrastructure to the cloud, en masse. They need a solution to do so reliably and securely, without expensive code or process changes, and without locking themselves to a single operating system or cloud. Today the only solution meeting these requirements is Docker Enterprise Edition. This puts Docker at the center of a massive growth opportunity. To take advantage of this opportunity, we need a CTO by Steve’s side with decades of experience shipping and supporting software for the largest corporations in the world. So I now have a new role: to help find that ideal CTO, provide the occasional bit of advice, and get out of the team’s way as they continue to build a juggernaut of a business. As a shareholder, I couldn’t be happier to accept this role. As a founder, of course, I have mixed emotions. When you create a company, your job is to make sure it can one day succeed without you. Then eventually that one day comes and the celebration can be bittersweet. It’s never easy for a founder to part ways with their life’s work. But I realize how incredibly lucky I am to have this problem. Most ideas never materialize. Most software goes unused. Most businesses fail in their first year. Yet here we are, one of the largest open-source communities ever assembled, collectively building software that will run on millions of computers around the world. To know that your work was meaningful, and that a vibrant community of people will continue building upon it…. can any founder ask for anything more? I want to thank from the bottom of my heart every member of the Docker team and community, past and present, for making Docker what it is today. Thanks to you, this founder’s bittersweet moment is mostly sweet. We have built something great together. I look forward to seeing where you will take it next. Happy hacking, Solomon
deleted 9y ago
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overcast 9y ago
Is it just a conscious joke at this point to put "incredible journey" in any of these types of announcements?
- kristianc 9y ago
  'Incredible journey' is usually reserved for software companies selling out or shutting down, neither of which is happening in this case.
  - sah2ed 9y ago
    The parent likely picked it up from the Twitter announcement: "The entire #Docker team would like to thank @solomonstre for creating the containerization movement and his 10 years of service and innovation. Thank you for bringing us all along on this incredible journey – we look forward to continued collaboration https://dockr.ly/2ut6OyO" https://dockr.ly/2ut6OyO" https://twitter.com/Docker/status/979027618866520064 https://twitter.com/Docker/status/979027618866520064
    - kristianc 9y ago
      Maybe they genuinely thought the journey had been incredible and wanted to express their gratitude to shykes, who after all, built the company they work for? It isn't a bad or forbidden phrase in and of itself, it just usually sounds rather hollow when users are getting screwed by a service shutting down. But Docker isn't shutting down. Also, consider when railing against cliched thinking that the 'Our Incredible Journey' Tumblr is by now a massive HN cliche. It no longer sounds insightful or smart.
- starpilot 9y ago
  http://svdictionary.com/words/incredible-journey http://svdictionary.com/words/incredible-journey
hartator 9y ago
It always amazes me how you can convince a founder/CEO is not right man for the job, and slowly push him away. Companies that succeed are driven by burning vision, not by day-to-day operation people. It might make feel the companies run smoother for some time, but day-to-day executives are harmful to a company core vision leading to boring companies if they manage to sustain profitability in the long run at all.
- fleitz 9y ago
  That’s incredibly myopic, there are lots of successful businesses that run because everything runs smoothly. What is the burning vision of Coca Cola? I’m pretty sure their business is successful because they sell the same product year after year with little to no change.
- chrisvalleybay 9y ago
  That's a pretty harsh generalisation. Edit: I should probably expand on that. Yes, in some cases keeping the founder as a CEO can be important for the morale of the team, but sometimes bringing in outside experience (the so called 'adult supervision') can be very important for a company. Eric Schmidt did a great job doing this for Google, before he assumed the role as chairman, leaving the CEO post for the founders at a later point.
- c_r_w 9y ago
  Whereas effective leaders are required to manage not only the day-to-day, but turning the core vision into an actual business plan that can pay employees rather than just burn VC money. My experience is the opposite; I've worked at two companies where the founder has returned to be CEO and in both cases they were highly ineffective.
  - eruditepanda 9y ago
    I'd concur, the generalization of one being better than the other just doesn't fit. I've worked for companies that fit into both situations and it really comes down to whether the founder had the skills to begin with or whether they were willing to admit that they needed help on the day-to-day operations & maintenance, etc.
chrisvalleybay 9y ago
I love the art made for the post. It's so emotional and powerful. The letter told the story, but the image made me feel the story. So simple, but yet so powerful. Also, @solomonstre has changed his Twitter profile picture. This is brilliant communication. He lets everyone know that he has moved on to other things, just from his profile picture. I think this is very interesting and clever.
- Chico75 9y ago
  Docker hired a famous french comic book artist for all their graphics: https://twitter.com/laurelcomics https://twitter.com/laurelcomics
  - ironjunkie 9y ago
    It really brought a beautiful graphical identity to their branding. Very well done!
  - a3_nm 9y ago
    I really enjoyed this long comic by Laurel https://commeconvenu.com/ https://commeconvenu.com/. It's available online, but only in French I'm afraid... It's the story of how she came to the US for a startup with her boyfriend and how they found themselves in a more and more difficult situation with their cofounders. It's gripping, hilarious at times, and the art is outstanding.
    - rjaco31 9y ago
      Wow, thanks for the link. That was a very interesting read & sad story.
- newsat13 9y ago
  Yeah, came here to say this https://i0.wp.com/blog.docker.com/wp-content/uploads/solomon-good-bye.jpg?zoom=2&resize=573%2C463&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/blog.docker.com/wp-content/uploads/solomon... is awesome
- avip 9y ago
sytse 9y ago
Thanks Solomon for creating the inflection point of the container revolution. I'm a bit puzzled about where docker as a company has to go. But the enthusiasm that was unleashed is without par.
- rhacker 9y ago
  I'm going to second this - docker has literally opened up pathways that very well be underpinning 80% of all new projects. Because of Docker I can bootstrap new employee's working environment in 5 minutes - everything is a container except they thing they are changing, commit, see.
  - pas 9y ago
    We still use Vagrant - because it's cross platform. And run docker inside that.
censorship 9y ago
Rip docker !
bmelton 9y ago
Like a lot of tech folks, I've only interacted with Solomon on the internet, but in probably every interaction, I've come away from it feeling smarter, or more capable, going all the way back to the very early days of Dotcloud. I understand the realities of working in a corporation, and the demands on C-level executives, but it's hard to imagine any company that is improved by his departure from it. Fare well, Solomon. Eager to see what you've got planned next.
- solipsism 9y ago
  Do you work for docker? If not, there's no need for farewells. It's not my impression that Solomon is leaving the planet :)
- chrisjc 9y ago
  Very excited to see how this new C-group executes. Probably one of the best departure messages I've ever seen.(especially with that image)
fargo 9y ago
"Our goal was to harness an obscure technology called containers" Was that really the goal? My impression was that dotcloud was just a hosting company
- nickstinemates 9y ago
  yes
distantsounds 9y ago
twitter mirror: https://twitter.com/solomonstre/status/979034154384834560 https://twitter.com/solomonstre/status/979034154384834560
peterwwillis 9y ago
I think their blog being hugged to death is a good example of how this technology (read: web backend tech in general, not containers) is still too complicated for people in general to use it for simple cases, like scaling the load of otherwise static content. (It's wordpress, but still) We need solutions that require less resources and smaller learning curves.
- markbnj 9y ago
  I don't know how their blog is hosted but wordpress in general is very chatty with the database backend, and I really don't think the site getting crushed by HN is indicative of fundamental issues with container technology. If it is then there is a long list of technologies that HN has exposed fundamental issues with by crushing their content sites :).
  - peterwwillis 9y ago
    Oh I'm not pointing at container technology. I'm talking web backend technology in general. I mean this is 2018. No well known company's blog on AWS should ever go down at all, unless the AWS service in the region is down. The fact that it's down is not a Docker failure or a Wordpress failure or a Database failure, as there are widely known methods to scale all these things. The problem is that putting the puzzle together is just complicated enough that it's easy to get wrong. If even Docker's blog can't scale, we have bigger issues as an industry.
    - markbnj 9y ago
      Fair enough. I took "this technology" to be a reference to Docker given the context.
    - andrewstuart2 9y ago
      If Docker's blog was their core product, I would probably be more likely to agree. The truth is, they don't get ROI from engineering their blog to anticipate or quickly respond to all the traffic of a major announcement, because those are few and far between. The level of complexity is moot because the benefits will only outweigh a very small cost. They build container tech. That doesn't mean they will benefit from engineering the best solution for everything they do.
discussedbefore 9y ago
This guy led Docker's marketing-first approach here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shykes https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shykes https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:shykes%20docker&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:shykes%20docker&sort=by... I put CloudFlare in a similar boat, but CloudFlare seems more tech-savvy (apart from one giant screw-up that cemented marketing-first for me). I'll always be sad that marketing wins.
- c_r_w 9y ago
  What does that mean, "marketing-first approach?" Is this a common distinction in the Hacker News culture?
  - discussedbefore 9y ago
    If I had to pick a more common phrase to research on HN, it would be "growth hacking". By marketing-first I mean growth hacking/PR is priority #1. I'm not saying anything against this person professionally or personally, it is more a textbook example of marketing hustle as key to financial success. I prioritize technology ahead of marketing, and am currently struggling to flip this around. PS. I didn't know Docker was YCS10, so props to YC for connecting with this person early. Growth hacking definitely fits into the YC culture.
    - sah2ed 9y ago
      > I prioritize technology ahead of marketing, and am currently struggling to flip this around. May I ask why you feel strongly about a technology-first approach? I can think of someone that tried your exact approach, but it didn't end well. He happens to be a member of this community [0] and he wrote a great blog post [1] introspecting as to the reasons why technology-first approaches don't work in the world we live in. If you've not read it, I encourage you to do so. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=coffeemug https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=coffeemug [1] http://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html http://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html
chatmasta 9y ago
Four months ago on HN, an anonymous account posted "SHykes has left Docker" [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15650335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15650335
- matte_black 9y ago
  Why’d they do that?
- 0xmohit 9y ago
  Another au revoir post [0] by Jérôme Petazzoni (also mentioned in shykes's post) a little over a month back. [0] https://jpetazzo.github.io/2018/02/17/seven-years-at-docker/ https://jpetazzo.github.io/2018/02/17/seven-years-at-docker/
- ezekg 9y ago
  I remember that. I was one of the users asking for the source. I wonder who the OP of that post was.
zackify 9y ago
Oh, the irony of the docker blog timing out...
ojosilva 9y ago
The author Solomon Hykes, user shykes, announced DotCloud's Docker was going opensource here on HN almost exactly 5 years ago on March 26th, 2013. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5445387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5445387 Aside for the near coincidence, I find reading historical first release posts very enlightening! I'd be happy if any of you would share first-reaction posts and chatter and more on Solomon's marketing-first approach on making Docker a tremendously successful opensource project.
DDerTyp 9y ago
Website is 502'ing, here is a the WaybackMachine-Version: https://web.archive.org/web/20180328164640/https://blog.docker.com/2018/03/au-revoir/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180328164640/https://blog.dock...
misterbowfinger 9y ago
As a founder, of course, I have mixed emotions. When you create a company, your job is to make sure it can one day succeed without you. Then eventually that one day comes and the celebration can be bittersweet. I've seen this before firsthand and it always looks painful. It's easy to look at something from afar and think, "why not just let it go?" But seeing the pain of letting go time and time again makes it seem far more difficult....
ridruejo 9y ago
What Solomon is doing, walking away from the company he helped create, is probably one of the hardest decisions an entrepreneur may need to take. Good luck with everything!
nunez 9y ago
Does this mean that Docker as a company is stable enough to function without one of its co-founders? Or does that mean that VC is taking it over?
borncrusader 9y ago
I hope it's not the case of enterprise bullying. I still believe Docker has the potential to grow into a much larger enterprise company if only it can navigate through the treacherous waters.
timsuchanek 9y ago
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0VT_m5Sl0FoJ:https://blog.docker.com/2018/03/au-revoir/%3Fnot-changed&num=1&hl=en&gl=de&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0VT_m5S...
PlaneSploit 9y ago
Looks like they are using Docker Swarm to host their website.
magic_beans 9y ago
Unintentionally hilarious that the Docker blog of all companies should have received the ol’ reddit hug of death...
betaby 9y ago
Well, 504. No cloud auto scaling?
vegancap 9y ago
Did anyone else well up at that final image? It's been a long week...
- odonnellryan 9y ago
  It's a nice image, but I'm trying to figure out what kind of rig that sailboat has.
  - jackmac92 9y ago
    I think it can only sail backwards...
wpasc 9y ago
docker ps -a SOLOMON HYKES Exited(0) 1 day ago Sad to see him go, so so grateful for his work!
matchagaucho 9y ago
Am I the only one reading a K8S concession into every Docker headline lately? I made a big bet on Docker a few years ago, so I know personally that's been the case.
mattlong 9y ago
Back in 2011, Solomon was nice enough to get lunch with me along with a few other DotClouders to talk me through some scaling issues my startup was stressing over. They were all super knowledgeable and helpful. We were able to get a handle on things thanks to their advice. Thanks so much and best of luck!
throwawaymanbot 9y ago
Au Revoir Legend.
segmondy 9y ago
I'm only interested in 2 things. a) Is he happy, was the journey worth it? b) How much money did he make? So long as he is happy and he didn't expose himself to any financial ruin. It's all good.
matt12345678 9y ago
Wow. These kinds of communications typically seem trite. But this one genuinely resonated with me. I'm glad things worked out for him. And thanks for Docker!
anonytrary 9y ago
HackerNews often snuffs out the websites it links to -- the "hug of death". Damn it. Guess I'll come back in 20 minutes.
- zeisss 9y ago
  https://twitter.com/Docker/status/979059103128436736 https://twitter.com/Docker/status/979059103128436736 twitter has a screenshot
deleted 9y ago
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throw2016 9y ago
Docker is a reflection of some of the side effects of HN. Self driving cars and AI are other tech being pushed in a misleading way. All these aggressively promote SV funded companies without proper technical scrutiny. The lack of scrutiny means questionable technical decisions and complicated tool chains that add layers of complexity with little benefit are passed on to users with little knowledge of the trade-offs involved. In a way the original promise of containers of being simple and portable have been completely lost to complicated wrappers like Docker and Kubernetes and words like devops that promise a lot but deliver an out of control web of complexity. Google and Facebook have an army of networking, storage (they even hired the btrfs developer), security and scalability experts. It's not 2 engineers doing devops. This also sets perverse incentives. Wrappers like Docker and Kubernetes monopolize all the attention and funding while the core open source projects that they are critically dependent on like LXC, Aufs, Overlayfs, Btrfs, Dnsmasq, Nginx, Keepalived, Consul, Quagga, Bird, open source networking tech, container tech in the kernel, apps are all hidden from view. Docker initially wrapped the LXC project without proper credit and there was a lot of misinformation about what LXC is, with zero pushback here. Many commentators even today are not clear about containers and think Docker invented containers. And this after thousands of posts about containers here.
- jchiu1106 9y ago
  > Wrappers like Docker and Kubernetes ... How's Kubernetes a wrapper? Wrapper on what? The ones you listed are dependencies. What projects don't have dependencies? > Docker initially wrapped the LXC project without proper credit ... Docker hasn't been a wrapper for lxc for a long time (at least 3+ years, which is a long time in tech world). Also, the debian package at the time was called lxc-docker. > Many commentators even today are not clear about containers and think Docker invented containers. Misguided people are always going to be the majority, especially in the tech world. People actually working with these technologies, they will bother to figure out the differences.
habosa 9y ago
Kinda funny that the page is down ... you'd think for a company that helps everyone scale their services this would not be a problem :-)
- jjoe 9y ago
  I'm not sure resource scaling is what's needed here. Just good ol' caching. Shameless plug: I built Cachoid[0] for caching as a service (leveraging Varnish mainly) to help with situations like this. [0] https://www.cachoid.com/ https://www.cachoid.com/
  - slifin 9y ago
    I understand that this is a shameless plug but I've met teams where the first response to any performance problem is caching If you're reading this and have performance issues look at caches as a last resort, first figure out why things are slow I'm assuming a traditional stack here but use mysql jet profiler, or SQL equivalent first, then your languages profiler xhprof? If your queries are slow or impossible make sure your tables are normalised and indexed, make sure opcache is on and xdebug off Mysql out of the box is very conservative with its resources, the limits can often be raised and the web server can often be configured to be faster, make sure you're sending the correct http cache headers There's so many things to consider with performance Please don't denormalise your data slap it in redis/ use varnish and call it a day No cache is free, eventually you have to pay the pied piper when you do make sure you can afford to have never used the cache at all Some of my hardest bugs have come from out of sync caches & trying to build performant data architecture around systems that had data stuffed into a redis black hole aged for years..
    - slifin 9y ago
      Also if you're doing key scans in redis, you're doing it wrong, it's possible to work around with indexes you have to manually maintain, but it's not worth it
    - jjoe 9y ago
      Lots of good common sense advice and practical experience there. I've had my fair share as a devops/sysadmin working on crazy systems (more worse than better haha). So it's unsurprising how common sense isn't always put into practice. I do believe caching to be the proverbial Swiss Army Knife of performance. Some of its tools can be used properly and others as band-aid / stop gap. Even band-aids serve a useful purpose. But I can definitely see how a system can accrue technical debt when over leveraging caching. But to believe in prevalent, perfectly built systems is to deny the status quo of the landscape. When you democratize development like WordPress has done with its plugins and Node has done with npm, as popular examples, you definitely have it coming.
mrb 9y ago
I remember being introduced to Solomon in Dec 2008 (a friend of a friend) and he came to my apartment in Los Angeles a few months later to demo his "dotCloud" project. He told me how he was using Mercurial to have a version-controlled repository of an entire root filesystem (including char and block device special files under /dev; he had to extend Mercurial to add support for them). I found this pretty cool and I could see the potential. He could check out multiple copies, make different changes, merge them, etc. It was basically a revision-controlled VM/container/system image. I was working on somewhat related technology at the time, http://qemudo.sourceforge.net/? http://qemudo.sourceforge.net/?, a web-interface to QEMU virtual machines where whole VMs could be created in <1 second by using copy-on-write disk images (QCOW.) Everyone I showed this to back in 2006-2008 was dumbfounded. The idea that VM creation could be a lightweight operation was brand new back then. Normally it involved copying a multi-gigabyte disk image. All the pieces of the tech stack were available to do this, but no well-polished product that combined them together existed. Of course dotCloud ended up being a precursor of Docker itself, and took the idea of "lightweight easy-to-create container" to an even higher level. shykes if you are reading this, hi!
rileytg 9y ago
cached link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vBSgkEL1hLMJ:https://blog.docker.com/2018/03/au-revoir/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vBSgkE...
jaytaylor 9y ago
Honest question: How common is it for a company to flourish after the original sole founder leaves? Having seen founders forced out by the board first-hand multiple times, I've yet to see things really take off after the departure of such a key player. I'm curious if, on average, it's really the right move.
iamwil 9y ago
Back in 2011, Solomon offered his team to help us out with some background job pool issue--mostly Paul. Thanks, and hope you planted enough little seeds along the way that you're able to get back to doing what you do best--making seedlings grow.
damm 9y ago
It's too bad but this is unfortunately how things work. You may start the company and as you get more and more people on the board that are not on your team your voice gets quieter. Until the people on the board vote to replace you and the silence is deafening. Brutal what business has come to
simonebrunozzi 9y ago
If you read between the lines, there's no mention of Ben Golub (Docker's CEO until few months ago). I am wondering if that's intentional, or... intentional. Or intentional?
haylem 9y ago
Solomon being French - and considering the title - my brain automatically played tricks on me and as I read his post's title I pictured him saying "Au Revoir" in its most famous form in France: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0obJfkU9xB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0obJfkU9xB4 . :D (It's the official good bye of former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing as he left office, and it's been used over and over again as a comic element.) My hat tip to shykes. We studied in the same engineering school and he was part of the teaching assistants' panel doing the interviews for the new batch of candidates I was in. When I met him that day, he was in charge of testing my conversational English level and this interview (amongst others) convinced me to go for this school. He was also one of my tutors/teachers in the first few months, and I eventually became part of the same teaching team. Great guy all around, talented technician and a great educator. I think he entirely deserves the praise for creating dotCloud and Docker, no matter what people may say about the underlying technology and the lackluster Docker activity lately. He's turned it into a great product and company, with impacts and snow-ball effects all over the IT landscape.

898 points by zapita 9y ago

504 gateway error? edit Solomon Hykes is departing - https://twitter.com/Docker/status/979027618866520064 https://twitter.com/Docker/status/979027618866520064

some_random 9y ago
Same, is there a mirror?

passivepinetree 9y ago

I'm getting a 504 Gateway timeout. Is the HN hug of death really affecting such a huge site?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sciurus 9y ago
blog.docker.com runs Wordpress, and the domain points directly at an ELB. Unless they are running some caching layer (behind that ELB but in front of their wordpress processes), they may have to scale out a lot in order to handle traffic spikes, and they may be limited in their ability to do that by DB capacity.
- passivepinetree 9y ago
  Interesting. Thank you for the clarification!

haney 9y ago

Site appears to be down but I'm guessing the post is related to this tweet? https://twitter.com/Docker/status/979027618866520064 https://twitter.com/Docker/status/979027618866520064

connorl33t 9y ago
Very short blog post from Solomon with a little bit of his history at Docker, noting that the company is at the point where he can leave it to run by itself without him.
deleted 9y ago
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notananthem 9y ago

504... rip

deleted 9y ago
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markbnj 9y ago

Finally loaded for me. Solomon Hykes is leaving the company.

Dayshine 9y ago

A founder has retired, nothing as dramatic as the title might imply.

jf 9y ago

I was able to get the page to load, here's the text of thet post: "Today I’m announcing my departure from Docker, the company I helped create ten years ago and have been building ever since. A founder’s departure is usually seen as a dramatic event. Sadly, I must report that reality is far less exciting in this case. I’ve had many roles at Docker over the years, and today I have a new, final one – as an active board member, a major shareholder and, I expect, a high maintenance Docker user. But I will no longer be part of day-to-day operations. Instead, after obsessing for so many years over my own ideas, I am rediscovering the joys of putting myself at the service of others – my friends, my family, and the brilliant entrepreneurs I’ve been lucky enough to advise and invest in over the years. Over the coming months I plan to use my experience to help them in any way I can. This transition is simply another chapter in a long story of change, growth, hard work… and a lot of luck. Ten years ago, I quit my job, returned to live with my mother in Paris and, together with my friends Kamel Founadi and Sebastien Pahl, started a company called Dotcloud. Our goal was to harness an obscure technology called containers, and use it to create what we called “tools of mass innovation”: programming tools which anyone could use. I was 24 and had no idea what I was doing. We needed a CEO, so that became my new role. Five years ago, Dotcloud reinvented itself as Docker, around a battle-hardened core of five people: Eric Bardin, Sam Alba, Jerome Petazzoni, Julien Barbier and myself. Soon growth was off the charts, and we hired an experienced CEO to help us sustain it. I was 29 and eager to do my part. Docker needed a CTO, so that became my new role. Today, as I turn 34, Docker has quietly transformed into an enterprise business with explosive revenue growth and a developer community in the millions, under the leadership of our CEO, the legendary Steve Singh. Our strategy is simple: every large enterprise in the world is preparing to migrate their applications and infrastructure to the cloud, en masse. They need a solution to do so reliably and securely, without expensive code or process changes, and without locking themselves to a single operating system or cloud. Today the only solution meeting these requirements is Docker Enterprise Edition. This puts Docker at the center of a massive growth opportunity. To take advantage of this opportunity, we need a CTO by Steve’s side with decades of experience shipping and supporting software for the largest corporations in the world. So I now have a new role: to help find that ideal CTO, provide the occasional bit of advice, and get out of the team’s way as they continue to build a juggernaut of a business. As a shareholder, I couldn’t be happier to accept this role. As a founder, of course, I have mixed emotions. When you create a company, your job is to make sure it can one day succeed without you. Then eventually that one day comes and the celebration can be bittersweet. It’s never easy for a founder to part ways with their life’s work. But I realize how incredibly lucky I am to have this problem. Most ideas never materialize. Most software goes unused. Most businesses fail in their first year. Yet here we are, one of the largest open-source communities ever assembled, collectively building software that will run on millions of computers around the world. To know that your work was meaningful, and that a vibrant community of people will continue building upon it…. can any founder ask for anything more? I want to thank from the bottom of my heart every member of the Docker team and community, past and present, for making Docker what it is today. Thanks to you, this founder’s bittersweet moment is mostly sweet. We have built something great together. I look forward to seeing where you will take it next. Happy hacking, Solomon"

danvoell 9y ago

Very well written. It has to be tough to walk away from something with as much trajectory. It also takes someone very self-aware to know when they are helping and where their talents can be better utilized.

Fenrisulfr 9y ago

Hug of death? Twitter post here: https://twitter.com/Docker/status/979027618866520064 https://twitter.com/Docker/status/979027618866520064

deleted 9y ago

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cryptoz 9y ago

Title should change. Sounds like Docker is shutting down permanently since the site doesn't load and the title is French for Good Bye.

fhood 9y ago
Haha, I clicked on it in a panick after remembering what au revoir meant.
- coding123 9y ago
  Yeah same was about to shit my pants...
zemo 9y ago
I dunno, I knew what the content of the post by seeing the title and the domain on its own. People (and companies) don't say good bye in the first person when they die, since they're, uh, dead. They just go "there is ... another ... sky... walker..." and disappear.

gk1 9y ago

Another source: http://www.eweek.com/enterprise-apps/docker-founder-solomon-hykes-announces-exit-from-docker-inc http://www.eweek.com/enterprise-apps/docker-founder-solomon-...

zapita 9y ago

It looks like their blog crashed under the load... Here's the full text below. Today I’m announcing my departure from Docker, the company I helped create ten years ago and have been building ever since. A founder’s departure is usually seen as a dramatic event. Sadly, I must report that reality is far less exciting in this case. I’ve had many roles at Docker over the years, and today I have a new, final one – as an active board member, a major shareholder and, I expect, a high maintenance Docker user. But I will no longer be part of day-to-day operations. Instead, after obsessing for so many years over my own ideas, I am rediscovering the joys of putting myself at the service of others – my friends, my family, and the brilliant entrepreneurs I’ve been lucky enough to advise and invest in over the years. Over the coming months I plan to use my experience to help them in any way I can. This transition is simply another chapter in a long story of change, growth, hard work… and a lot of luck. Ten years ago, I quit my job, returned to live with my mother in Paris and, together with my friends Kamel Founadi and Sebastien Pahl, started a company called Dotcloud. Our goal was to harness an obscure technology called containers, and use it to create what we called “tools of mass innovation”: programming tools which anyone could use. I was 24 and had no idea what I was doing. We needed a CEO, so that became my new role. Five years ago, Dotcloud reinvented itself as Docker, around a battle-hardened core of five people: Eric Bardin, Sam Alba, Jerome Petazzoni, Julien Barbier and myself. Soon growth was off the charts, and we hired an experienced CEO to help us sustain it. I was 29 and eager to do my part. Docker needed a CTO, so that became my new role. Today, as I turn 34, Docker has quietly transformed into an enterprise business with explosive revenue growth and a developer community in the millions, under the leadership of our CEO, the legendary Steve Singh. Our strategy is simple: every large enterprise in the world is preparing to migrate their applications and infrastructure to the cloud, en masse. They need a solution to do so reliably and securely, without expensive code or process changes, and without locking themselves to a single operating system or cloud. Today the only solution meeting these requirements is Docker Enterprise Edition. This puts Docker at the center of a massive growth opportunity. To take advantage of this opportunity, we need a CTO by Steve’s side with decades of experience shipping and supporting software for the largest corporations in the world. So I now have a new role: to help find that ideal CTO, provide the occasional bit of advice, and get out of the team’s way as they continue to build a juggernaut of a business. As a shareholder, I couldn’t be happier to accept this role. As a founder, of course, I have mixed emotions. When you create a company, your job is to make sure it can one day succeed without you. Then eventually that one day comes and the celebration can be bittersweet. It’s never easy for a founder to part ways with their life’s work. But I realize how incredibly lucky I am to have this problem. Most ideas never materialize. Most software goes unused. Most businesses fail in their first year. Yet here we are, one of the largest open-source communities ever assembled, collectively building software that will run on millions of computers around the world. To know that your work was meaningful, and that a vibrant community of people will continue building upon it…. can any founder ask for anything more? I want to thank from the bottom of my heart every member of the Docker team and community, past and present, for making Docker what it is today. Thanks to you, this founder’s bittersweet moment is mostly sweet. We have built something great together. I look forward to seeing where you will take it next. Happy hacking, Solomon

deleted 9y ago

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overcast 9y ago

Is it just a conscious joke at this point to put "incredible journey" in any of these types of announcements?

kristianc 9y ago
'Incredible journey' is usually reserved for software companies selling out or shutting down, neither of which is happening in this case.
- sah2ed 9y ago
  The parent likely picked it up from the Twitter announcement: "The entire #Docker team would like to thank @solomonstre for creating the containerization movement and his 10 years of service and innovation. Thank you for bringing us all along on this incredible journey – we look forward to continued collaboration https://dockr.ly/2ut6OyO" https://dockr.ly/2ut6OyO" https://twitter.com/Docker/status/979027618866520064 https://twitter.com/Docker/status/979027618866520064
  - kristianc 9y ago
    Maybe they genuinely thought the journey had been incredible and wanted to express their gratitude to shykes, who after all, built the company they work for? It isn't a bad or forbidden phrase in and of itself, it just usually sounds rather hollow when users are getting screwed by a service shutting down. But Docker isn't shutting down. Also, consider when railing against cliched thinking that the 'Our Incredible Journey' Tumblr is by now a massive HN cliche. It no longer sounds insightful or smart.
starpilot 9y ago
http://svdictionary.com/words/incredible-journey http://svdictionary.com/words/incredible-journey

hartator 9y ago

It always amazes me how you can convince a founder/CEO is not right man for the job, and slowly push him away. Companies that succeed are driven by burning vision, not by day-to-day operation people. It might make feel the companies run smoother for some time, but day-to-day executives are harmful to a company core vision leading to boring companies if they manage to sustain profitability in the long run at all.

fleitz 9y ago
That’s incredibly myopic, there are lots of successful businesses that run because everything runs smoothly. What is the burning vision of Coca Cola? I’m pretty sure their business is successful because they sell the same product year after year with little to no change.
chrisvalleybay 9y ago
That's a pretty harsh generalisation. Edit: I should probably expand on that. Yes, in some cases keeping the founder as a CEO can be important for the morale of the team, but sometimes bringing in outside experience (the so called 'adult supervision') can be very important for a company. Eric Schmidt did a great job doing this for Google, before he assumed the role as chairman, leaving the CEO post for the founders at a later point.
c_r_w 9y ago
Whereas effective leaders are required to manage not only the day-to-day, but turning the core vision into an actual business plan that can pay employees rather than just burn VC money. My experience is the opposite; I've worked at two companies where the founder has returned to be CEO and in both cases they were highly ineffective.
- eruditepanda 9y ago
  I'd concur, the generalization of one being better than the other just doesn't fit. I've worked for companies that fit into both situations and it really comes down to whether the founder had the skills to begin with or whether they were willing to admit that they needed help on the day-to-day operations & maintenance, etc.

chrisvalleybay 9y ago

I love the art made for the post. It's so emotional and powerful. The letter told the story, but the image made me feel the story. So simple, but yet so powerful. Also, @solomonstre has changed his Twitter profile picture. This is brilliant communication. He lets everyone know that he has moved on to other things, just from his profile picture. I think this is very interesting and clever.

Chico75 9y ago
Docker hired a famous french comic book artist for all their graphics: https://twitter.com/laurelcomics https://twitter.com/laurelcomics
- ironjunkie 9y ago
  It really brought a beautiful graphical identity to their branding. Very well done!
- a3_nm 9y ago
  I really enjoyed this long comic by Laurel https://commeconvenu.com/ https://commeconvenu.com/. It's available online, but only in French I'm afraid... It's the story of how she came to the US for a startup with her boyfriend and how they found themselves in a more and more difficult situation with their cofounders. It's gripping, hilarious at times, and the art is outstanding.
  - rjaco31 9y ago
    Wow, thanks for the link. That was a very interesting read & sad story.
newsat13 9y ago
Yeah, came here to say this https://i0.wp.com/blog.docker.com/wp-content/uploads/solomon-good-bye.jpg?zoom=2&resize=573%2C463&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/blog.docker.com/wp-content/uploads/solomon... is awesome
avip 9y ago

sytse 9y ago

Thanks Solomon for creating the inflection point of the container revolution. I'm a bit puzzled about where docker as a company has to go. But the enthusiasm that was unleashed is without par.

rhacker 9y ago
I'm going to second this - docker has literally opened up pathways that very well be underpinning 80% of all new projects. Because of Docker I can bootstrap new employee's working environment in 5 minutes - everything is a container except they thing they are changing, commit, see.
- pas 9y ago
  We still use Vagrant - because it's cross platform. And run docker inside that.

censorship 9y ago

Rip docker !

bmelton 9y ago

Like a lot of tech folks, I've only interacted with Solomon on the internet, but in probably every interaction, I've come away from it feeling smarter, or more capable, going all the way back to the very early days of Dotcloud. I understand the realities of working in a corporation, and the demands on C-level executives, but it's hard to imagine any company that is improved by his departure from it. Fare well, Solomon. Eager to see what you've got planned next.

solipsism 9y ago
Do you work for docker? If not, there's no need for farewells. It's not my impression that Solomon is leaving the planet :)
chrisjc 9y ago
Very excited to see how this new C-group executes. Probably one of the best departure messages I've ever seen.(especially with that image)

fargo 9y ago

"Our goal was to harness an obscure technology called containers" Was that really the goal? My impression was that dotcloud was just a hosting company

nickstinemates 9y ago
yes

distantsounds 9y ago

twitter mirror: https://twitter.com/solomonstre/status/979034154384834560 https://twitter.com/solomonstre/status/979034154384834560

peterwwillis 9y ago

I think their blog being hugged to death is a good example of how this technology (read: web backend tech in general, not containers) is still too complicated for people in general to use it for simple cases, like scaling the load of otherwise static content. (It's wordpress, but still) We need solutions that require less resources and smaller learning curves.

markbnj 9y ago
I don't know how their blog is hosted but wordpress in general is very chatty with the database backend, and I really don't think the site getting crushed by HN is indicative of fundamental issues with container technology. If it is then there is a long list of technologies that HN has exposed fundamental issues with by crushing their content sites :).
- peterwwillis 9y ago
  Oh I'm not pointing at container technology. I'm talking web backend technology in general. I mean this is 2018. No well known company's blog on AWS should ever go down at all, unless the AWS service in the region is down. The fact that it's down is not a Docker failure or a Wordpress failure or a Database failure, as there are widely known methods to scale all these things. The problem is that putting the puzzle together is just complicated enough that it's easy to get wrong. If even Docker's blog can't scale, we have bigger issues as an industry.
  - markbnj 9y ago
    Fair enough. I took "this technology" to be a reference to Docker given the context.
  - andrewstuart2 9y ago
    If Docker's blog was their core product, I would probably be more likely to agree. The truth is, they don't get ROI from engineering their blog to anticipate or quickly respond to all the traffic of a major announcement, because those are few and far between. The level of complexity is moot because the benefits will only outweigh a very small cost. They build container tech. That doesn't mean they will benefit from engineering the best solution for everything they do.

discussedbefore 9y ago

This guy led Docker's marketing-first approach here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shykes https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shykes https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:shykes%20docker&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:shykes%20docker&sort=by... I put CloudFlare in a similar boat, but CloudFlare seems more tech-savvy (apart from one giant screw-up that cemented marketing-first for me). I'll always be sad that marketing wins.

c_r_w 9y ago
What does that mean, "marketing-first approach?" Is this a common distinction in the Hacker News culture?
- discussedbefore 9y ago
  If I had to pick a more common phrase to research on HN, it would be "growth hacking". By marketing-first I mean growth hacking/PR is priority #1. I'm not saying anything against this person professionally or personally, it is more a textbook example of marketing hustle as key to financial success. I prioritize technology ahead of marketing, and am currently struggling to flip this around. PS. I didn't know Docker was YCS10, so props to YC for connecting with this person early. Growth hacking definitely fits into the YC culture.
  - sah2ed 9y ago
    > I prioritize technology ahead of marketing, and am currently struggling to flip this around. May I ask why you feel strongly about a technology-first approach? I can think of someone that tried your exact approach, but it didn't end well. He happens to be a member of this community [0] and he wrote a great blog post [1] introspecting as to the reasons why technology-first approaches don't work in the world we live in. If you've not read it, I encourage you to do so. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=coffeemug https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=coffeemug [1] http://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html http://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html

chatmasta 9y ago

Four months ago on HN, an anonymous account posted "SHykes has left Docker" [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15650335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15650335

matte_black 9y ago
Why’d they do that?
0xmohit 9y ago
Another au revoir post [0] by Jérôme Petazzoni (also mentioned in shykes's post) a little over a month back. [0] https://jpetazzo.github.io/2018/02/17/seven-years-at-docker/ https://jpetazzo.github.io/2018/02/17/seven-years-at-docker/
ezekg 9y ago
I remember that. I was one of the users asking for the source. I wonder who the OP of that post was.

zackify 9y ago

Oh, the irony of the docker blog timing out...

ojosilva 9y ago

The author Solomon Hykes, user shykes, announced DotCloud's Docker was going opensource here on HN almost exactly 5 years ago on March 26th, 2013. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5445387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5445387 Aside for the near coincidence, I find reading historical first release posts very enlightening! I'd be happy if any of you would share first-reaction posts and chatter and more on Solomon's marketing-first approach on making Docker a tremendously successful opensource project.

DDerTyp 9y ago

Website is 502'ing, here is a the WaybackMachine-Version: https://web.archive.org/web/20180328164640/https://blog.docker.com/2018/03/au-revoir/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180328164640/https://blog.dock...

misterbowfinger 9y ago

As a founder, of course, I have mixed emotions. When you create a company, your job is to make sure it can one day succeed without you. Then eventually that one day comes and the celebration can be bittersweet. I've seen this before firsthand and it always looks painful. It's easy to look at something from afar and think, "why not just let it go?" But seeing the pain of letting go time and time again makes it seem far more difficult....

ridruejo 9y ago

What Solomon is doing, walking away from the company he helped create, is probably one of the hardest decisions an entrepreneur may need to take. Good luck with everything!

nunez 9y ago

Does this mean that Docker as a company is stable enough to function without one of its co-founders? Or does that mean that VC is taking it over?

borncrusader 9y ago

I hope it's not the case of enterprise bullying. I still believe Docker has the potential to grow into a much larger enterprise company if only it can navigate through the treacherous waters.

timsuchanek 9y ago

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0VT_m5Sl0FoJ:https://blog.docker.com/2018/03/au-revoir/%3Fnot-changed&num=1&hl=en&gl=de&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0VT_m5S...

PlaneSploit 9y ago

Looks like they are using Docker Swarm to host their website.

magic_beans 9y ago

Unintentionally hilarious that the Docker blog of all companies should have received the ol’ reddit hug of death...

betaby 9y ago

Well, 504. No cloud auto scaling?

vegancap 9y ago

Did anyone else well up at that final image? It's been a long week...

odonnellryan 9y ago
It's a nice image, but I'm trying to figure out what kind of rig that sailboat has.
- jackmac92 9y ago
  I think it can only sail backwards...

wpasc 9y ago

docker ps -a SOLOMON HYKES Exited(0) 1 day ago Sad to see him go, so so grateful for his work!

matchagaucho 9y ago

Am I the only one reading a K8S concession into every Docker headline lately? I made a big bet on Docker a few years ago, so I know personally that's been the case.

mattlong 9y ago

Back in 2011, Solomon was nice enough to get lunch with me along with a few other DotClouders to talk me through some scaling issues my startup was stressing over. They were all super knowledgeable and helpful. We were able to get a handle on things thanks to their advice. Thanks so much and best of luck!

throwawaymanbot 9y ago

Au Revoir Legend.

segmondy 9y ago

I'm only interested in 2 things. a) Is he happy, was the journey worth it? b) How much money did he make? So long as he is happy and he didn't expose himself to any financial ruin. It's all good.

matt12345678 9y ago

Wow. These kinds of communications typically seem trite. But this one genuinely resonated with me. I'm glad things worked out for him. And thanks for Docker!

anonytrary 9y ago

HackerNews often snuffs out the websites it links to -- the "hug of death". Damn it. Guess I'll come back in 20 minutes.

zeisss 9y ago
https://twitter.com/Docker/status/979059103128436736 https://twitter.com/Docker/status/979059103128436736 twitter has a screenshot

deleted 9y ago

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throw2016 9y ago

Docker is a reflection of some of the side effects of HN. Self driving cars and AI are other tech being pushed in a misleading way. All these aggressively promote SV funded companies without proper technical scrutiny. The lack of scrutiny means questionable technical decisions and complicated tool chains that add layers of complexity with little benefit are passed on to users with little knowledge of the trade-offs involved. In a way the original promise of containers of being simple and portable have been completely lost to complicated wrappers like Docker and Kubernetes and words like devops that promise a lot but deliver an out of control web of complexity. Google and Facebook have an army of networking, storage (they even hired the btrfs developer), security and scalability experts. It's not 2 engineers doing devops. This also sets perverse incentives. Wrappers like Docker and Kubernetes monopolize all the attention and funding while the core open source projects that they are critically dependent on like LXC, Aufs, Overlayfs, Btrfs, Dnsmasq, Nginx, Keepalived, Consul, Quagga, Bird, open source networking tech, container tech in the kernel, apps are all hidden from view. Docker initially wrapped the LXC project without proper credit and there was a lot of misinformation about what LXC is, with zero pushback here. Many commentators even today are not clear about containers and think Docker invented containers. And this after thousands of posts about containers here.

jchiu1106 9y ago
> Wrappers like Docker and Kubernetes ... How's Kubernetes a wrapper? Wrapper on what? The ones you listed are dependencies. What projects don't have dependencies? > Docker initially wrapped the LXC project without proper credit ... Docker hasn't been a wrapper for lxc for a long time (at least 3+ years, which is a long time in tech world). Also, the debian package at the time was called lxc-docker. > Many commentators even today are not clear about containers and think Docker invented containers. Misguided people are always going to be the majority, especially in the tech world. People actually working with these technologies, they will bother to figure out the differences.

habosa 9y ago

Kinda funny that the page is down ... you'd think for a company that helps everyone scale their services this would not be a problem :-)

jjoe 9y ago
I'm not sure resource scaling is what's needed here. Just good ol' caching. Shameless plug: I built Cachoid[0] for caching as a service (leveraging Varnish mainly) to help with situations like this. [0] https://www.cachoid.com/ https://www.cachoid.com/
- slifin 9y ago
  I understand that this is a shameless plug but I've met teams where the first response to any performance problem is caching If you're reading this and have performance issues look at caches as a last resort, first figure out why things are slow I'm assuming a traditional stack here but use mysql jet profiler, or SQL equivalent first, then your languages profiler xhprof? If your queries are slow or impossible make sure your tables are normalised and indexed, make sure opcache is on and xdebug off Mysql out of the box is very conservative with its resources, the limits can often be raised and the web server can often be configured to be faster, make sure you're sending the correct http cache headers There's so many things to consider with performance Please don't denormalise your data slap it in redis/ use varnish and call it a day No cache is free, eventually you have to pay the pied piper when you do make sure you can afford to have never used the cache at all Some of my hardest bugs have come from out of sync caches & trying to build performant data architecture around systems that had data stuffed into a redis black hole aged for years..
  - slifin 9y ago
    Also if you're doing key scans in redis, you're doing it wrong, it's possible to work around with indexes you have to manually maintain, but it's not worth it
  - jjoe 9y ago
    Lots of good common sense advice and practical experience there. I've had my fair share as a devops/sysadmin working on crazy systems (more worse than better haha). So it's unsurprising how common sense isn't always put into practice. I do believe caching to be the proverbial Swiss Army Knife of performance. Some of its tools can be used properly and others as band-aid / stop gap. Even band-aids serve a useful purpose. But I can definitely see how a system can accrue technical debt when over leveraging caching. But to believe in prevalent, perfectly built systems is to deny the status quo of the landscape. When you democratize development like WordPress has done with its plugins and Node has done with npm, as popular examples, you definitely have it coming.

mrb 9y ago

I remember being introduced to Solomon in Dec 2008 (a friend of a friend) and he came to my apartment in Los Angeles a few months later to demo his "dotCloud" project. He told me how he was using Mercurial to have a version-controlled repository of an entire root filesystem (including char and block device special files under /dev; he had to extend Mercurial to add support for them). I found this pretty cool and I could see the potential. He could check out multiple copies, make different changes, merge them, etc. It was basically a revision-controlled VM/container/system image. I was working on somewhat related technology at the time, http://qemudo.sourceforge.net/? http://qemudo.sourceforge.net/?, a web-interface to QEMU virtual machines where whole VMs could be created in <1 second by using copy-on-write disk images (QCOW.) Everyone I showed this to back in 2006-2008 was dumbfounded. The idea that VM creation could be a lightweight operation was brand new back then. Normally it involved copying a multi-gigabyte disk image. All the pieces of the tech stack were available to do this, but no well-polished product that combined them together existed. Of course dotCloud ended up being a precursor of Docker itself, and took the idea of "lightweight easy-to-create container" to an even higher level. shykes if you are reading this, hi!

rileytg 9y ago

cached link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vBSgkEL1hLMJ:https://blog.docker.com/2018/03/au-revoir/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vBSgkE...

jaytaylor 9y ago

Honest question: How common is it for a company to flourish after the original sole founder leaves? Having seen founders forced out by the board first-hand multiple times, I've yet to see things really take off after the departure of such a key player. I'm curious if, on average, it's really the right move.

iamwil 9y ago

Back in 2011, Solomon offered his team to help us out with some background job pool issue--mostly Paul. Thanks, and hope you planted enough little seeds along the way that you're able to get back to doing what you do best--making seedlings grow.

damm 9y ago

It's too bad but this is unfortunately how things work. You may start the company and as you get more and more people on the board that are not on your team your voice gets quieter. Until the people on the board vote to replace you and the silence is deafening. Brutal what business has come to

simonebrunozzi 9y ago

If you read between the lines, there's no mention of Ben Golub (Docker's CEO until few months ago). I am wondering if that's intentional, or... intentional. Or intentional?

haylem 9y ago

Solomon being French - and considering the title - my brain automatically played tricks on me and as I read his post's title I pictured him saying "Au Revoir" in its most famous form in France: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0obJfkU9xB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0obJfkU9xB4 . :D (It's the official good bye of former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing as he left office, and it's been used over and over again as a comic element.) My hat tip to shykes. We studied in the same engineering school and he was part of the teaching assistants' panel doing the interviews for the new batch of candidates I was in. When I met him that day, he was in charge of testing my conversational English level and this interview (amongst others) convinced me to go for this school. He was also one of my tutors/teachers in the first few months, and I eventually became part of the same teaching team. Great guy all around, talented technician and a great educator. I think he entirely deserves the praise for creating dotCloud and Docker, no matter what people may say about the underlying technology and the lackluster Docker activity lately. He's turned it into a great product and company, with impacts and snow-ball effects all over the IT landscape.