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Rereading the zones paper now makes me cringe, but I was in my 20s, what can I say. I think the argument we made that holds up is that this was designed to be

Rereading the zones paper now makes me cringe, but I was in my 20s, what can I say. I think the argument we made that holds up is that this was designed to be a technology for server consolidation, and the opening section sets some context about how primitive things were in Sun's enterprise customer base at the time. I have a lot of admiration for what Docker dared to do-- to really think differently about the problem in a way which changed application deployment for everyone. Also I can tell you at the time that we were not especially concerned about HP or IBM's solutions in this space; nor did we face those container solutions competitively in any sales situation that I can recall. This tech was fielded in the wake of the dot-com blowout-- and customers had huge estates of servers often at comically low utilization. So this was a good opportunity for Sun to say "We are aligned with your desire to get maximum value out of the hardware you already have." It's a blast to see this come up from time to time on HN, thanks.

panick21_ 2y ago
> Rereading the zones paper now makes me cringe, but I was in my 20s, what can I say. Still a nice paper! > to really think differently about the problem in a way which changed application deployment for everyone. Could that also have been done with Zones? In terms of the developer experience? Seems to me Docker just thought about the develop-and-deploy pipeline differently.
- dprice1 2y ago
  Yes, technology wise, I think it could have been done; once I left Sun/Oracle I stopped paying attention, so I can't speak to what else was done later.
- solarengineer 2y ago
  I had done the packaging work (like what Docker has done) as part of experiments with Belenix. I used puppet and rpm5 (that I had ported to Belenix) to ensure idempotency, and used ZFS snapshots for the layers. Unfortunately, life happened and I did not take the work live.
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    Interesting, never heard of BeleniX. Funny how live turns sometimes. Docker was open-sourced because a PAAS company almost went bust and exploded.
solarengineer 2y ago
Please take some pride in your work. I ended up DTracing Zones and I find your ideas to be excellent.

panick21_ 2y ago

> Rereading the zones paper now makes me cringe, but I was in my 20s, what can I say. Still a nice paper! > to really think differently about the problem in a way which changed application deployment for everyone. Could that also have been done with Zones? In terms of the developer experience? Seems to me Docker just thought about the develop-and-deploy pipeline differently.

dprice1 2y ago
Yes, technology wise, I think it could have been done; once I left Sun/Oracle I stopped paying attention, so I can't speak to what else was done later.
solarengineer 2y ago
I had done the packaging work (like what Docker has done) as part of experiments with Belenix. I used puppet and rpm5 (that I had ported to Belenix) to ensure idempotency, and used ZFS snapshots for the layers. Unfortunately, life happened and I did not take the work live.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  Interesting, never heard of BeleniX. Funny how live turns sometimes. Docker was open-sourced because a PAAS company almost went bust and exploded.

solarengineer 2y ago

Please take some pride in your work. I ended up DTracing Zones and I find your ideas to be excellent.