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To me this article conflates the removal of a piece of legacy hard-coding (dockershim) with the overall death of Docker. That removal doesn't mean that Docker

To me this article conflates the removal of a piece of legacy hard-coding (dockershim) with the overall death of Docker. That removal doesn't mean that Docker won't be used as part of Kubernetes clusters any more, Docker/Mirantis have committed to creating a CRI plugin for Docker. But realistically Docker the product is primarily a developer tool and I don't see that going away. Docker for Windows/Mac is the easiest way to use containers, without having (mostly) to worry about low-level implementation details. Whether that can be translated to a successful business model, is another question :)

tariqislam_ 6y ago
Author here. Thanks for your comment! I struggled with this as well. I agree that I might be conflating things a bit, but I did try to contextualize the slow but gradual move away from all things docker with the fate of the company, starting with the platform wars and resulting in the runtime deprecation. I think a lot of what happened came about because Docker took on Kubernetes with Swarm and lost.
- nrvn 6y ago
  But take a look at this from a different angle. Yes, from the business perspective Docker, inc. seems to be failing badly. But from the engineering perspective they did a tremendous job splitting the monolith to separate components. Containerd was once part of Docker daemon and then abstracted away to an independent entity. And we all hugely benefit from this split. Now, the next big thing is happening - buildkit. It is already possible to build containers using buildkit without docker. There is even a plugin for kubectl for convenience. Docker is tearing itself apart but I see only good things happening around it. P.S. It has been possible to use containerd directly as CRI for Kubernetes since v1.10 https://kubernetes.io/blog/2018/05/24/kubernetes-containerd-integration-goes-ga/ https://kubernetes.io/blog/2018/05/24/kubernetes-containerd-...
musicale 6y ago
> Docker for Windows/Mac is the easiest way to use containers This is depressing. Even more depressing is that macOS still doesn't seem to have native containers. (Correct me if I'm wrong - perhaps the sandboxing system can be used as a container system including virtual network interfaces attached to process groups?) Docker images depend on Linux which means "Docker" on macOS runs in a Linux VM. Presumably docker for Windows could use WSL.
- ianlevesque 6y ago
  It does use WSL2 if present.
  - pzduniak 6y ago
    And it works pretty well, other than some network bugs every now and then, which seem to be a WSL2 thing. I moved from OSX to Windows around the release of build 2004 and the development experience has been great.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  > Docker images depend on Linux which means "Docker" on macOS runs in a Linux VM. Presumably docker for Windows could use WSL. WSL2 is also a VM. Docker is in truth Linux-only software, and "Docker" on any other platform is a polished interface for spinning up a Linux VM and running the real version of Docker there. I don't think this is such a bad thing. What non-Linux Docker really provides is a nice UI. On my Mac, I switched from doing a lot of development in VMWare Fusion to using docker-machine (set up to still use VMWare under the hood). With docker-machine especially, it's quite obvious that I'm still just using a VM, but it all feels a lot more seamless than when I was running a bunch of commands to start up VMWare, SSH in, and sync my local files. ---------- † I can't use Docker Desktop because I insist on running an old version of OS X.
  - Kwpolska 6y ago
    Docker for Windows is capable of running Linux containers (on top of WSL2 or a Docker-specific Hyper-V VM), and it can also run Windows containers. You can only pick one of those, but if you want to containerize Windows software, Docker can do this. (If you’re on Windows 10 Home, only the WSL2 backend is available.)
    - crazysim 6y ago
      You can actually run both Windows and Linux containers at the same time. You don't need to pick "one of these". I think the flag to switch between them on the fly is "--platform".

tariqislam_ 6y ago

Author here. Thanks for your comment! I struggled with this as well. I agree that I might be conflating things a bit, but I did try to contextualize the slow but gradual move away from all things docker with the fate of the company, starting with the platform wars and resulting in the runtime deprecation. I think a lot of what happened came about because Docker took on Kubernetes with Swarm and lost.

nrvn 6y ago
But take a look at this from a different angle. Yes, from the business perspective Docker, inc. seems to be failing badly. But from the engineering perspective they did a tremendous job splitting the monolith to separate components. Containerd was once part of Docker daemon and then abstracted away to an independent entity. And we all hugely benefit from this split. Now, the next big thing is happening - buildkit. It is already possible to build containers using buildkit without docker. There is even a plugin for kubectl for convenience. Docker is tearing itself apart but I see only good things happening around it. P.S. It has been possible to use containerd directly as CRI for Kubernetes since v1.10 https://kubernetes.io/blog/2018/05/24/kubernetes-containerd-integration-goes-ga/ https://kubernetes.io/blog/2018/05/24/kubernetes-containerd-...

musicale 6y ago

> Docker for Windows/Mac is the easiest way to use containers This is depressing. Even more depressing is that macOS still doesn't seem to have native containers. (Correct me if I'm wrong - perhaps the sandboxing system can be used as a container system including virtual network interfaces attached to process groups?) Docker images depend on Linux which means "Docker" on macOS runs in a Linux VM. Presumably docker for Windows could use WSL.

ianlevesque 6y ago
It does use WSL2 if present.
- pzduniak 6y ago
  And it works pretty well, other than some network bugs every now and then, which seem to be a WSL2 thing. I moved from OSX to Windows around the release of build 2004 and the development experience has been great.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
> Docker images depend on Linux which means "Docker" on macOS runs in a Linux VM. Presumably docker for Windows could use WSL. WSL2 is also a VM. Docker is in truth Linux-only software, and "Docker" on any other platform is a polished interface for spinning up a Linux VM and running the real version of Docker there. I don't think this is such a bad thing. What non-Linux Docker really provides is a nice UI. On my Mac, I switched from doing a lot of development in VMWare Fusion to using docker-machine (set up to still use VMWare under the hood). With docker-machine especially, it's quite obvious that I'm still just using a VM, but it all feels a lot more seamless than when I was running a bunch of commands to start up VMWare, SSH in, and sync my local files. ---------- † I can't use Docker Desktop because I insist on running an old version of OS X.
- Kwpolska 6y ago
  Docker for Windows is capable of running Linux containers (on top of WSL2 or a Docker-specific Hyper-V VM), and it can also run Windows containers. You can only pick one of those, but if you want to containerize Windows software, Docker can do this. (If you’re on Windows 10 Home, only the WSL2 backend is available.)
  - crazysim 6y ago
    You can actually run both Windows and Linux containers at the same time. You don't need to pick "one of these". I think the flag to switch between them on the fly is "--platform".