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I remember having a ton of sympathy for CoreOS, Docker really was hard to integrate with as someone doing sysadmin automation stuff. Docker went to war with th

I remember having a ton of sympathy for CoreOS, Docker really was hard to integrate with as someone doing sysadmin automation stuff. Docker went to war with the standard Linux init system and the kernel developers who maintained cgroups, their core system primitive. I don't really understand how that was supposed to work out.

bcantrill 5y ago
I honestly feel that they were both pretty unsympathetic. In particular, CoreOS timed their Rocket announcement for the moment at which the Docker team was airborne en route to DockerCon Europe 2014. It was very petty -- to say nothing of the petty naming (clearly a play on "Docker") or the generally antagonistic approach. None of this is to forgive Docker, who was equally petty in their response -- and a sign of much more pettiness to come, sadly...
- pengaru 5y ago
  > CoreOS timed their Rocket announcement for the moment at which the Docker team was airborne en route to DockerCon Europe 2014 Would that be the conference where Jessie Frazelle wore this telling gem of a troll badge? [0] If so, the parent article [1] says it was 2015. I was actually present at CoreOS during this period, and played a significant role in the early rkt releases. There's no prominent memory of timing the announcement to coincide with Docker people being on a plane, I think we were just rushing to get it out by dockercon and the en route thing is a coincidence. Rkt didn't just appear out of nowhere overnight, we had to build it and making something like that actually work reliably as a standalone executable without installing a daemon on arbitrary distros is a bit of a chore. [0] https://static.lwn.net/images/2016/devconf-badge.jpg https://static.lwn.net/images/2016/devconf-badge.jpg [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/676831/ https://lwn.net/Articles/676831/
  - bcantrill 5y ago
    No, it was DockerCon EU, December 4-5, 2014 -- and the Docker folks very much believed that it was deliberately timed to their flight several days prior. Unknowable now as that may be, there is no question that Rocket took deliberate aim at Docker -- and timing its announcement to upstage DockerCon is frankly only marginally less petty than timing it to a transoceanic flight. Lest I be seen as defending Docker, Inc. or DockerCon: this is also the only conference that removed a presentation of mine because they didn't like presentations that had more views than their keynotes. So Docker Inc. very much made their own bed, and I understand how Alex and CoreOS got to the point they got to -- but it doesn't mean that they were any more sympathetic in the resulting spat...
    - pengaru 5y ago
      Rkt took deliberate aim at the problem of reliably running docker containers as systemd services, and as one of the early rkt developers I can honestly say I did so grudgingly after various meetings convincing me we had no choice. If the Docker folks hadn't deliberately obstructed our ability to reliably run Docker containers as systemd services, none of this would have been necessary. We certainly had better things to spend our time on.
      - mixmastamyk 5y ago
        I never understood why Rocket was killed, when it seemed to be a better design. Was it because Red Hat was already pushing podman and didn't need two tools doing similar things?
        dralley 5y ago
        I'm not the person you asked, but another rkt dev answered a similar question last year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22250270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22250270
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        pengaru 5y ago
        Not sure, I was no longer involved when those changes were happening. What I can say is there was a lot of change in the container landscape at the time. Kubernetes flipped the script, Fleet from CoreOS was deprecated, and my guess is amidst the consolidation happening around Kubernetes and the CNCF, rkt became less relevant and just didn't find a permanent home. Flannel, Fleet, Rocket... does anyone use any of this stuff still? "Move fast and break things" tends to leave a trail of waste in its wake.
  - robszumski 5y ago
    Early CoreOS employee and involved in all of the launch conversations around this...I can confirm there was absolutely no talk of travel plans or catching them at a bad time or anything of the sort. It simply had to get shipped before the conference started so we could talk about it.

bcantrill 5y ago

I honestly feel that they were both pretty unsympathetic. In particular, CoreOS timed their Rocket announcement for the moment at which the Docker team was airborne en route to DockerCon Europe 2014. It was very petty -- to say nothing of the petty naming (clearly a play on "Docker") or the generally antagonistic approach. None of this is to forgive Docker, who was equally petty in their response -- and a sign of much more pettiness to come, sadly...

pengaru 5y ago
> CoreOS timed their Rocket announcement for the moment at which the Docker team was airborne en route to DockerCon Europe 2014 Would that be the conference where Jessie Frazelle wore this telling gem of a troll badge? [0] If so, the parent article [1] says it was 2015. I was actually present at CoreOS during this period, and played a significant role in the early rkt releases. There's no prominent memory of timing the announcement to coincide with Docker people being on a plane, I think we were just rushing to get it out by dockercon and the en route thing is a coincidence. Rkt didn't just appear out of nowhere overnight, we had to build it and making something like that actually work reliably as a standalone executable without installing a daemon on arbitrary distros is a bit of a chore. [0] https://static.lwn.net/images/2016/devconf-badge.jpg https://static.lwn.net/images/2016/devconf-badge.jpg [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/676831/ https://lwn.net/Articles/676831/
- bcantrill 5y ago
  No, it was DockerCon EU, December 4-5, 2014 -- and the Docker folks very much believed that it was deliberately timed to their flight several days prior. Unknowable now as that may be, there is no question that Rocket took deliberate aim at Docker -- and timing its announcement to upstage DockerCon is frankly only marginally less petty than timing it to a transoceanic flight. Lest I be seen as defending Docker, Inc. or DockerCon: this is also the only conference that removed a presentation of mine because they didn't like presentations that had more views than their keynotes. So Docker Inc. very much made their own bed, and I understand how Alex and CoreOS got to the point they got to -- but it doesn't mean that they were any more sympathetic in the resulting spat...
  - pengaru 5y ago
    Rkt took deliberate aim at the problem of reliably running docker containers as systemd services, and as one of the early rkt developers I can honestly say I did so grudgingly after various meetings convincing me we had no choice. If the Docker folks hadn't deliberately obstructed our ability to reliably run Docker containers as systemd services, none of this would have been necessary. We certainly had better things to spend our time on.
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      I never understood why Rocket was killed, when it seemed to be a better design. Was it because Red Hat was already pushing podman and didn't need two tools doing similar things?
      - dralley 5y ago
        I'm not the person you asked, but another rkt dev answered a similar question last year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22250270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22250270
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - pengaru 5y ago
        Not sure, I was no longer involved when those changes were happening. What I can say is there was a lot of change in the container landscape at the time. Kubernetes flipped the script, Fleet from CoreOS was deprecated, and my guess is amidst the consolidation happening around Kubernetes and the CNCF, rkt became less relevant and just didn't find a permanent home. Flannel, Fleet, Rocket... does anyone use any of this stuff still? "Move fast and break things" tends to leave a trail of waste in its wake.
- robszumski 5y ago
  Early CoreOS employee and involved in all of the launch conversations around this...I can confirm there was absolutely no talk of travel plans or catching them at a bad time or anything of the sort. It simply had to get shipped before the conference started so we could talk about it.