4 ms·

The rise of Docker is fascinating. How did you get people to care about it initially? Did everyone immediately see it as a good idea? Congrats.

shykes 13y ago
We spent 3 months going door to door, making demos to people I knew were working on similar projects or looking for one. We had a good reputation in the ops and systems engineering community because of our work on dotCloud over the last 6 years. Then we bootstrapped the open-source community with that initial group of 30-50 people willing to federate efforts. By the time the project was leaked on hacker news, the github repo and mailing list were already very active. Early members of that "seed" community included engineers from Twilio, Heroku, Soundcloud, Koding, Google, Meteor, RethinkDB, Mailgun, as well as the current members of the Flynn project.
- recuter 13y ago
  So, hi there. I'd like to invest in you guys, where do I send the cheque? :)
  - recuter 13y ago
    No response yet, hmm. Seriously, guys, I have a $100 bill here with your name on it.
    - shykes 13y ago
      I am flattered, but we are already well funded and are not currently looking for new investors. However if you're feeling generous I can point you to a few people who have been making awesome contributions to Docker on their free time. I'm sure they would appreciate donations, or perhaps contract work :) There are also several startups currently raising money for a business based on docker. This is bigger than any one company!
    - lost-theory 13y ago
      I'm sure you can find some of the developers here: http://www.gittip.com/ http://www.gittip.com/.
atomaka 13y ago
The real question is why Sun didn't succeed in leveraging this technology with their implementation of zones.
- wmf 13y ago
  Because Solaris isn't Linux and nobody got fired for using Linux. Even Ian Murdock couldn't make Solaris into Linux.
- Procrastes 13y ago
  As a former Sun guy, I can say it's because extracting value wasn't something we were very good at or really gave much weight. From Grid to Java to Solaris 10 Zones and ZFS, Jini, RFID we mostly just made cool stuff and then... went and made other cool stuff. We had very little adult supervision.
- edbyrne 13y ago
  To be honest - I think it's a timing thing - virtualization wasn't popular initially but VMWare did a great marketing job. Then any hyper-visor became acceptable. Now - VPS-style containers are becoming acceptable. IE: Docker.
  - shykes 13y ago
    Timing is definitely part of it. Being too early can kill you. If you think your idea is awesome but too early, my advice is to keep trying for as long as it takes. Docker was not my first attempt at solving this particular problem :) [1] [2] [3] [1] https://bitbucket.org/Foi3GraS/dotcloud-fork/commits/1 https://bitbucket.org/Foi3GraS/dotcloud-fork/commits/1 [2] https://github.com/dotcloud/cloudlets/commit/0af885a5266fba79ac99a79d214f14be05946ffb https://github.com/dotcloud/cloudlets/commit/0af885a5266fba7... [3] https://bitbucket.org/dotcloud/vm2vm/commits/2a34438989fbff034d0034b4bea255c61a6238e8 https://bitbucket.org/dotcloud/vm2vm/commits/2a34438989fbff0...
kcen 13y ago
I learned about it from creack (lead contributor according to github) @ a startup meetup in SF. Things that impressed me: 1. super passionate 2. he was very receptive and quick at squashing bugs I reported (real or not) 3. docker was super portable (the same across all linux distros) 4. they (the docker team) had real solutions for the long application deployment times that were plaguing me Everyone seemed to know it would succeed, which is rare around here.
MadeInSyria 13y ago
When you are an ops and spend time finding the perfect way to make "redeploying easier than fixing", docker became the answer. I got to meet the docker team (a lot of french dudes in the team!). Very passionate, technically super sharp, and really fun ! They were interested in my point of view and opinion. Plus, there lead dev knows how to party from what i have seen during a meetup !

shykes 13y ago

We spent 3 months going door to door, making demos to people I knew were working on similar projects or looking for one. We had a good reputation in the ops and systems engineering community because of our work on dotCloud over the last 6 years. Then we bootstrapped the open-source community with that initial group of 30-50 people willing to federate efforts. By the time the project was leaked on hacker news, the github repo and mailing list were already very active. Early members of that "seed" community included engineers from Twilio, Heroku, Soundcloud, Koding, Google, Meteor, RethinkDB, Mailgun, as well as the current members of the Flynn project.

recuter 13y ago
So, hi there. I'd like to invest in you guys, where do I send the cheque? :)
- recuter 13y ago
  No response yet, hmm. Seriously, guys, I have a $100 bill here with your name on it.
  - shykes 13y ago
    I am flattered, but we are already well funded and are not currently looking for new investors. However if you're feeling generous I can point you to a few people who have been making awesome contributions to Docker on their free time. I'm sure they would appreciate donations, or perhaps contract work :) There are also several startups currently raising money for a business based on docker. This is bigger than any one company!
  - lost-theory 13y ago
    I'm sure you can find some of the developers here: http://www.gittip.com/ http://www.gittip.com/.

atomaka 13y ago

The real question is why Sun didn't succeed in leveraging this technology with their implementation of zones.

wmf 13y ago
Because Solaris isn't Linux and nobody got fired for using Linux. Even Ian Murdock couldn't make Solaris into Linux.
Procrastes 13y ago
As a former Sun guy, I can say it's because extracting value wasn't something we were very good at or really gave much weight. From Grid to Java to Solaris 10 Zones and ZFS, Jini, RFID we mostly just made cool stuff and then... went and made other cool stuff. We had very little adult supervision.
edbyrne 13y ago
To be honest - I think it's a timing thing - virtualization wasn't popular initially but VMWare did a great marketing job. Then any hyper-visor became acceptable. Now - VPS-style containers are becoming acceptable. IE: Docker.
- shykes 13y ago
  Timing is definitely part of it. Being too early can kill you. If you think your idea is awesome but too early, my advice is to keep trying for as long as it takes. Docker was not my first attempt at solving this particular problem :) [1] [2] [3] [1] https://bitbucket.org/Foi3GraS/dotcloud-fork/commits/1 https://bitbucket.org/Foi3GraS/dotcloud-fork/commits/1 [2] https://github.com/dotcloud/cloudlets/commit/0af885a5266fba79ac99a79d214f14be05946ffb https://github.com/dotcloud/cloudlets/commit/0af885a5266fba7... [3] https://bitbucket.org/dotcloud/vm2vm/commits/2a34438989fbff034d0034b4bea255c61a6238e8 https://bitbucket.org/dotcloud/vm2vm/commits/2a34438989fbff0...

kcen 13y ago

I learned about it from creack (lead contributor according to github) @ a startup meetup in SF. Things that impressed me: 1. super passionate 2. he was very receptive and quick at squashing bugs I reported (real or not) 3. docker was super portable (the same across all linux distros) 4. they (the docker team) had real solutions for the long application deployment times that were plaguing me Everyone seemed to know it would succeed, which is rare around here.

MadeInSyria 13y ago

When you are an ops and spend time finding the perfect way to make "redeploying easier than fixing", docker became the answer. I got to meet the docker team (a lot of french dudes in the team!). Very passionate, technically super sharp, and really fun ! They were interested in my point of view and opinion. Plus, there lead dev knows how to party from what i have seen during a meetup !