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I never thought about that. Is it really just that? Then how come Docker is this huge innovation that conquered the world and nobody can live without it anymore

by krick 7y ago

I never thought about that. Is it really just that? Then how come Docker is this huge innovation that conquered the world and nobody can live without it anymore?

vimda 7y ago
The innovation was the layered distribution system. Suddenly it was more efficient to distribute images to hundreds or thousands of hosts
- jroroooepjro 7y ago
  It was the right UX at the right time. Personally, I preferred my home brew “Kube” that would ssh updates to cgroups from a central control server. Which is basically the Chef model, and Salt model of clients pulling desired state. Docker & Kube aren’t novel and weren’t as specific things. Tons of home brew options operating in roughly the same style existed around the net. Their adoption in industry, use at scale, simply gives them a grander appearance of somehow being truly novel
vertex-four 7y ago
So the explanation for that is in how moderately sized companies work. There are system administrators, and there are developers. The developer writes some software, tells the sysadmin what environment it needs to run, and the sysadmin builds and maintains that environment. Docker allows the programmer to write more code to build and maintain their environment, cutting the system administrator out of the loop; the sysadmin just has to provide a server able to run generic Docker containers, and doesn’t have to care about what’s in them. Basically it’s a bit of a power grab, and a bit of developers being upset about slow processes in their companies (“why does it take two weeks to deploy a new version of this dependency”) and finding a workaround. Then the rest of the world started cargo-culting them.
- jrockway 7y ago
  I think that's a pretty unfair assessment. It is likely that the underlying problem was that no Linux distribution had all the packages people needed. You need the latest version of Python, and a bunch of modules, and MySQL, and Nginx, and node.js, and... and that never happened. Debian stable had something from 6 years ago. Debian unstable didn't boot. Every time you got a new machine or new developer, you would have to painstakingly manually install all those packages on top of your OS base image, probably breaking other parts of the OS as you did that. Docker lets you build all the dependencies once, and then run it anywhere. You can run your container on your Mac in a (managed!) VM. You can send it to Amazon to run on a random EC2 instance that you don't have to manually update. Or you can just run it on your normal server, without affecting anything else on that server. It isn't about developers wanting to write more code. It's about developers getting annoyed with the difficulty of installing software.
  - vertex-four 7y ago
    The point is that the developers were not the people installing software in production in the environments that Docker gained popularity in.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  I agree with the initial assertion as to how companies work when they start to grow to medium or larger. The rest, though, feels an awful lot like projection on the parent's part; someone's an insecure admin or programmer reveling in their superiority at a moderately sized company -- not meant to be an ad hominim but you're really specific there, buddy. The enterprise is about supportability, scalability, and ease of maintenance. Officially support software and common tools/platforms/SOPs are a must unless we're building something brand new from scratch. DIY charoot jails may work just fine... until the two admins who really know it go on vacation or quit or get fired for mining BTC on company gear. Now Johnny-New-Hire needs to unravel it, and it may not be documented well, or even work that well without an admin kicking it occasionally. Were I to put a job advert out for DevOps roles needing Docker I could usually get someone with a base level of competency, and get them reasonably quickly. Likewise if I need to outsource this to contractors or even offshore budget IT support it's a lot easier to find a Docker guy then it is running someone through whiteboard exercises to figure out how much they know about jails and makefiles. And if we're way out of our league with issues there is Enterprise Docker which is expensive but gets us official support from Marentis (or whoever owns them now), which may not be justified in terms of cost, but absolutely makes management sleep easier knowing we can escalate things if we can't fix it internally.
parineum 7y ago
The parent explained it as if it wasn't novel but he included all the reasons why Docker became what it is. Basically, "it's just chroot with [tons of useful features]"
- jjeaff 7y ago
  It's also an ecosystem. The biggest innovation for me is being able to browse the docker hub and get official distributions to start from for basically anything out there.

by krick 7y ago

I never thought about that. Is it really just that? Then how come Docker is this huge innovation that conquered the world and nobody can live without it anymore?

vimda 7y ago

The innovation was the layered distribution system. Suddenly it was more efficient to distribute images to hundreds or thousands of hosts

jroroooepjro 7y ago
It was the right UX at the right time. Personally, I preferred my home brew “Kube” that would ssh updates to cgroups from a central control server. Which is basically the Chef model, and Salt model of clients pulling desired state. Docker & Kube aren’t novel and weren’t as specific things. Tons of home brew options operating in roughly the same style existed around the net. Their adoption in industry, use at scale, simply gives them a grander appearance of somehow being truly novel

vertex-four 7y ago

So the explanation for that is in how moderately sized companies work. There are system administrators, and there are developers. The developer writes some software, tells the sysadmin what environment it needs to run, and the sysadmin builds and maintains that environment. Docker allows the programmer to write more code to build and maintain their environment, cutting the system administrator out of the loop; the sysadmin just has to provide a server able to run generic Docker containers, and doesn’t have to care about what’s in them. Basically it’s a bit of a power grab, and a bit of developers being upset about slow processes in their companies (“why does it take two weeks to deploy a new version of this dependency”) and finding a workaround. Then the rest of the world started cargo-culting them.

jrockway 7y ago
I think that's a pretty unfair assessment. It is likely that the underlying problem was that no Linux distribution had all the packages people needed. You need the latest version of Python, and a bunch of modules, and MySQL, and Nginx, and node.js, and... and that never happened. Debian stable had something from 6 years ago. Debian unstable didn't boot. Every time you got a new machine or new developer, you would have to painstakingly manually install all those packages on top of your OS base image, probably breaking other parts of the OS as you did that. Docker lets you build all the dependencies once, and then run it anywhere. You can run your container on your Mac in a (managed!) VM. You can send it to Amazon to run on a random EC2 instance that you don't have to manually update. Or you can just run it on your normal server, without affecting anything else on that server. It isn't about developers wanting to write more code. It's about developers getting annoyed with the difficulty of installing software.
- vertex-four 7y ago
  The point is that the developers were not the people installing software in production in the environments that Docker gained popularity in.
blaser-waffle 7y ago
I agree with the initial assertion as to how companies work when they start to grow to medium or larger. The rest, though, feels an awful lot like projection on the parent's part; someone's an insecure admin or programmer reveling in their superiority at a moderately sized company -- not meant to be an ad hominim but you're really specific there, buddy. The enterprise is about supportability, scalability, and ease of maintenance. Officially support software and common tools/platforms/SOPs are a must unless we're building something brand new from scratch. DIY charoot jails may work just fine... until the two admins who really know it go on vacation or quit or get fired for mining BTC on company gear. Now Johnny-New-Hire needs to unravel it, and it may not be documented well, or even work that well without an admin kicking it occasionally. Were I to put a job advert out for DevOps roles needing Docker I could usually get someone with a base level of competency, and get them reasonably quickly. Likewise if I need to outsource this to contractors or even offshore budget IT support it's a lot easier to find a Docker guy then it is running someone through whiteboard exercises to figure out how much they know about jails and makefiles. And if we're way out of our league with issues there is Enterprise Docker which is expensive but gets us official support from Marentis (or whoever owns them now), which may not be justified in terms of cost, but absolutely makes management sleep easier knowing we can escalate things if we can't fix it internally.

parineum 7y ago

The parent explained it as if it wasn't novel but he included all the reasons why Docker became what it is. Basically, "it's just chroot with [tons of useful features]"

jjeaff 7y ago
It's also an ecosystem. The biggest innovation for me is being able to browse the docker hub and get official distributions to start from for basically anything out there.