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I appreciate the author's insights of taking previous examples of technology shifts, extracting a generic pattern from them, and then applying it to the new Doc

by jasode 12y ago

I appreciate the author's insights of taking previous examples of technology shifts, extracting a generic pattern from them, and then applying it to the new Docker direction. But I don't fully buy into it. To me, the new emphasis on "orchestrating & managing" containers is an obvious and unavoidable progression of taming new layers of complexity as they appear. The lower level technology of containers solved one set of complexities (app deploy onto 1 operating system), but they also create new complexities: tame the explosion of a thousand containers in the data center. How is this different from MS System Center, HP OpenView, and IBM Tivoli as managers/watchdogs of Windows & Linux boxes or KVM-over-ip to remotely reboot/powercycle racks of servers? Yes, those "enterprisey management console" products are "value added" and successful. Yes, there was competition between OpenView & Tivoli and competition between KVM vendors. But they weren't the kind of products that captured mindshare as glamorous; it was just something the IT department picked to "keep the lights running". Those management products also did not mint billionaires (millionaires yes, but not billionaires.) So the recent analysis from blogs that pits Docker vs CoreOs as a "strategic-winner-take-all" platform war like Internet Explorer vs Netscape doesn't feel quite accurate. It seems like the more interesting software fight is datacenter cloud o/s which is even higher level than Docker's orchestration-of-containers focus. Example of this would be OpenStack[1]. Proprietary ones would be Facebook internal cloud stack and Amazon AWS. This "datacenter-as-a-platform" would subsume the container standards fight. There may be something I'm missing in the Docker vs CoreOS that makes me discount this competition while others are playing it up. For example, is there some plugin architecture that would lock in developer mindshare? [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack

dantiberian 12y ago
It seems like the more interesting software fight is datacenter cloud o/s which is even higher level than Docker's orchestration-of-containers focus. I hadn't thought about it, but this makes a lot of sense as the next place of competition where value can be added. It's also where CoreOS is trying to be. It would also suggest that the level above that is abstracting datacenter's away to just manage a single global system made up of multiple DC's. There may be something I'm missing in the Docker vs CoreOS that makes me discount this competition while others are playing it up. Docker and CoreOS aren't strictly competing with each other, CoreOS wanted to use Docker as a commodity component (as it was designed), Docker eventually realised that becoming a commodity businesses wasn't going to be very profitable and moved into CoreOS' territory.
- jacques_chester 12y ago
  > It would also suggest that the level above that is abstracting datacenter's away to just manage a single global system made up of multiple DC's. I work on Cloud Foundry. We already have this tool, at least for the IaaS layer. It's called BOSH[1], and it allows no-downtime deploys and updates of very large PaaSes (such as our own Pivotal Web Services). In our reference Cloud Foundry configuration, cf-release[2], we define a deployment manifest that can install a Cloud Foundry instance that spans two AWS availability zones. We dogfood this system every week. Sometimes twice per week. Our entire Pivotal Web Services system is updated, live, online. And basically, it's very rare that anyone notices. Which is awesome. [1] https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh [2] https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-release https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-release
jacques_chester 12y ago
The interesting fight is actually the next level up from OpenStack (or AWS, or vSphere). It's in the PaaS space: Cloud Foundry and OpenShift are sprinting to be the full-service cloud an enterprise can run in a private datacentre. I have a dog in this fight -- I work on Cloud Foundry. Naturally I think CF's tech is better, especially our next generation of controller/staging/execution/health management (Diego).

by jasode 12y ago

dantiberian 12y ago

It seems like the more interesting software fight is datacenter cloud o/s which is even higher level than Docker's orchestration-of-containers focus. I hadn't thought about it, but this makes a lot of sense as the next place of competition where value can be added. It's also where CoreOS is trying to be. It would also suggest that the level above that is abstracting datacenter's away to just manage a single global system made up of multiple DC's. There may be something I'm missing in the Docker vs CoreOS that makes me discount this competition while others are playing it up. Docker and CoreOS aren't strictly competing with each other, CoreOS wanted to use Docker as a commodity component (as it was designed), Docker eventually realised that becoming a commodity businesses wasn't going to be very profitable and moved into CoreOS' territory.

jacques_chester 12y ago
> It would also suggest that the level above that is abstracting datacenter's away to just manage a single global system made up of multiple DC's. I work on Cloud Foundry. We already have this tool, at least for the IaaS layer. It's called BOSH[1], and it allows no-downtime deploys and updates of very large PaaSes (such as our own Pivotal Web Services). In our reference Cloud Foundry configuration, cf-release[2], we define a deployment manifest that can install a Cloud Foundry instance that spans two AWS availability zones. We dogfood this system every week. Sometimes twice per week. Our entire Pivotal Web Services system is updated, live, online. And basically, it's very rare that anyone notices. Which is awesome. [1] https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh [2] https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-release https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-release

jacques_chester 12y ago

The interesting fight is actually the next level up from OpenStack (or AWS, or vSphere). It's in the PaaS space: Cloud Foundry and OpenShift are sprinting to be the full-service cloud an enterprise can run in a private datacentre. I have a dog in this fight -- I work on Cloud Foundry. Naturally I think CF's tech is better, especially our next generation of controller/staging/execution/health management (Diego).