3 ms·

Rocket vs. Docker and the Myth of the “Simple, Lightweight Enterprise Platform”

31 points by remmelt 12y ago

antocv 12y ago
I cant read this whateveritis because the fonts are too gray/white as the background. Skimming through it, yes whatever you define as "enterprise" can fit your definition and whatever claim you are doing in the article or blog, can be fulfilled.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  Just in case http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=site&url=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.today%2FtmXB9 http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=site&url=https%3A...
- apwashere 12y ago
  > I cant read this whateveritis because the fonts are too gray/white as the background. Sorry about that, antocv. I've spoken to our web team about the colour scheme a few times already. Thanks to agumonkey for the link!
- mrSugar 12y ago
  Well, I can't read it at all on my android phone, because whatever javascript they use, prevents me from scrolling down. While the page was loading, scrolling worked, but as soon as everything loaded up, it jumped back to the top and stuck there. I hate today's web, where people are apparently unable to serve a plain text article without javascript.
  - apwashere 12y ago
    sigh. Sorry about that. Did agumonkey's link work for you?
    - mrSugar 12y ago
      Yep, that one worked just fine.
ossreality 12y ago
??? Does the author understand ANY motivations for rocket? They're asking for exactly what rocket has set out not to be. Rocket doesn't contain an orchestration platform, become rocket knows it's a tool to be composed into an orchestration system. It will work excellently with Kubernetes.
vidarh 12y ago
He's setting up a nice strawman. I didn't see anything in the Rocket proposal that implied they thought the things Docker wants to add aren't needed, just that they object to the direction and want to be able to pick and choose from components that fit their purpose better, and want guarantees of interop through open formats etc. Who is propagating this myth of the "Simple, Lightweight Enterprise Platform" to begin with? Some searches did not net me any references to that other than this blog post.
- apwashere 12y ago
  > I didn't see anything in the Rocket proposal that implied they thought the things Docker wants to add aren't needed I was referring mainly to this statement: "We should stop talking about Docker containers, and start talking about the Docker Platform. It is not becoming the simple composable building block we had envisioned." I agree with you that that doesn't necessarily mean that the Rocket team disputes the need for enterprise features, but (as you say) may think other technologies are better suited. The announcement itself doesn't go into much detail as to which technologies those would be, though. > Who is propagating this myth of the "Simple, Lightweight Enterprise Platform" to begin with? It certainly hasn't been associated with this specific phrase, but the idea that there is a New Cool Tech around the corner that will be simpler, easier and less heavyweight than the Last Cool Tech seems to be a recurring theme in our industry, in my experience. That's not to say that new technologies don't introduce dramatic improvements in certain areas. Personally, I'm a big fan of microservices and, specifically, containers as a possible implementation mechanism. Equally, I don't think it's surprising that technologies such as Docker that start out as 'simple, composable building blocks' become part of more complex, "heavyweight" solutions as they evolve.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    > The announcement itself doesn't go into much detail as to which technologies those would be, though. That's part of the point. They want to be free to compose components depending on their customers needs. CoreOS already includes Fleet (orchestration of individual units), and their are putting effort into Flannel (overlay network), and Kubernetes (orchestration of "pods" of containers). But their market is enterprises that in many cases will want to fit CoreOS into an existing enterprise platform. Nothing in how CoreOS is acting has shown any indication that they think enterprise is "simple". On the contrary, Rocket, while smaller in scope than Docker, if anything is more complex (with the signing, composability of filesets, and implied support for running systemd in the containers). I'm not convinced Rocket is the right thing - they'll have to show me tooling that makes it as simple as Docker first - but some of the decisions appeals to me (a clear spec for the format, that alternative runtimes can conform to; e.g. nothing appears to prevent someone from making a Rocket runtime ("ACE") that uses KVM or Virtualbox or Xen, and hence it could be potentially supported by things like OpenStack, or even shoehorned into a VMware deployment; making things like whether or not an overlay filesystem is used an implementation detail; and while I won't need it often, and it may be an annoyance in some cases, support for signed images). So I just see nothing to imply that CoreOS is a good exponent for some idea of "simple, lightweight enterprise platform". They are providing a set of tools that individually are simple and lightweight, that you can use to start building the lower levels of an enterprise platform with, though, and understandably don't want one of those tools to grow into a platform itself (whether or not Docker will grow into that in a way that doesn't allow the core container execution mechanism to be easily lifted out, is a separate discussion).
bryanlarsen 12y ago
You've got your conclusions backwards. Docker is the one that's trying to do things the simple way. Rocket embraces the Unix process model and philosophy. They don't have to solve this particular security problem because it's been solved over almost 40 years of Unix evolution. The Docker simplicity is why they've had so much success. That's how it started: as a tool to make using LXC simpler.
- apwashere 12y ago
  > The Docker simplicity is why they've had so much success. That's how it started: as a tool to make using LXC simpler. Do you feel Machine, Swarm and Compose add to or detract from the value proposition of Docker, in that case? Just to ensure I'm understanding your point about Rocket benefiting from 40 years of Unix evolution correctly: do you think that Rocket will be able to remain simple as a result of this? And that Docker perhaps will not, even though up until this point it's been "trying to do things the simple way?"
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
agentultra 12y ago
It happens every time. As soon as you hit an environment where there are > 20 people using the system you need a plethora of tools and systems involved which remove the terms, "simple" and "lightweight," from the specification. Access control, authentication, auditing, operations... you can't eschew complexity by ignoring it. I've learned this time and again. If you start out with "simple" and "lightweight" you're going to hit that "enterprise wall" and really pay the price of not considering those requirements up-front. The price of either re-writes or layers of out-of-band processes and tools for orchestrating light-weight systems that were not designed to be composed in such a way. It's quite painful and terrifyingly complicated. Update: In the case of Docker/Rocket... I think these are just early iterations. I wouldn't be surprised if even Rocket becomes bloated as they realize they cannot design for simplicity when complexity is a requirement.
- apwashere 12y ago
  > I wouldn't be surprised if even Rocket becomes bloated as they realize they cannot design for simplicity when complexity is a requirement. That was pretty much what I was trying to get at with the question of how a "Rocket ecosystem" would address these requirements. I think vidarh makes a valid point that these could be met by tools outside the container system that are better suited...but I am curious as to what this combination of tools would be.
  - agentultra 12y ago
    We just need more people experimenting and more enterprises willing to adopt some of these technologies on small, easily contained projects to get some field experience with them. I think we're finally seeing the first iterations of the operating system disappearing into the network... an idea that has been touted for some decades.
- bryanlarsen 12y ago
  Rocket is simple because they externalize the complexity. Rocket itself is simple and will stay simple. It's not much more than a tarball. The Rocket ecosystem will be necessarily complex.

31 points by remmelt 12y ago

I cant read this whateveritis because the fonts are too gray/white as the background. Skimming through it, yes whatever you define as "enterprise" can fit your definition and whatever claim you are doing in the article or blog, can be fulfilled.

agumonkey 12y ago
Just in case http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=site&url=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.today%2FtmXB9 http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=site&url=https%3A...
apwashere 12y ago
> I cant read this whateveritis because the fonts are too gray/white as the background. Sorry about that, antocv. I've spoken to our web team about the colour scheme a few times already. Thanks to agumonkey for the link!
mrSugar 12y ago
Well, I can't read it at all on my android phone, because whatever javascript they use, prevents me from scrolling down. While the page was loading, scrolling worked, but as soon as everything loaded up, it jumped back to the top and stuck there. I hate today's web, where people are apparently unable to serve a plain text article without javascript.
- apwashere 12y ago
  sigh. Sorry about that. Did agumonkey's link work for you?
  - mrSugar 12y ago
    Yep, that one worked just fine.

ossreality 12y ago

??? Does the author understand ANY motivations for rocket? They're asking for exactly what rocket has set out not to be. Rocket doesn't contain an orchestration platform, become rocket knows it's a tool to be composed into an orchestration system. It will work excellently with Kubernetes.

vidarh 12y ago

He's setting up a nice strawman. I didn't see anything in the Rocket proposal that implied they thought the things Docker wants to add aren't needed, just that they object to the direction and want to be able to pick and choose from components that fit their purpose better, and want guarantees of interop through open formats etc. Who is propagating this myth of the "Simple, Lightweight Enterprise Platform" to begin with? Some searches did not net me any references to that other than this blog post.

apwashere 12y ago
> I didn't see anything in the Rocket proposal that implied they thought the things Docker wants to add aren't needed I was referring mainly to this statement: "We should stop talking about Docker containers, and start talking about the Docker Platform. It is not becoming the simple composable building block we had envisioned." I agree with you that that doesn't necessarily mean that the Rocket team disputes the need for enterprise features, but (as you say) may think other technologies are better suited. The announcement itself doesn't go into much detail as to which technologies those would be, though. > Who is propagating this myth of the "Simple, Lightweight Enterprise Platform" to begin with? It certainly hasn't been associated with this specific phrase, but the idea that there is a New Cool Tech around the corner that will be simpler, easier and less heavyweight than the Last Cool Tech seems to be a recurring theme in our industry, in my experience. That's not to say that new technologies don't introduce dramatic improvements in certain areas. Personally, I'm a big fan of microservices and, specifically, containers as a possible implementation mechanism. Equally, I don't think it's surprising that technologies such as Docker that start out as 'simple, composable building blocks' become part of more complex, "heavyweight" solutions as they evolve.
- vidarh 12y ago
  > The announcement itself doesn't go into much detail as to which technologies those would be, though. That's part of the point. They want to be free to compose components depending on their customers needs. CoreOS already includes Fleet (orchestration of individual units), and their are putting effort into Flannel (overlay network), and Kubernetes (orchestration of "pods" of containers). But their market is enterprises that in many cases will want to fit CoreOS into an existing enterprise platform. Nothing in how CoreOS is acting has shown any indication that they think enterprise is "simple". On the contrary, Rocket, while smaller in scope than Docker, if anything is more complex (with the signing, composability of filesets, and implied support for running systemd in the containers). I'm not convinced Rocket is the right thing - they'll have to show me tooling that makes it as simple as Docker first - but some of the decisions appeals to me (a clear spec for the format, that alternative runtimes can conform to; e.g. nothing appears to prevent someone from making a Rocket runtime ("ACE") that uses KVM or Virtualbox or Xen, and hence it could be potentially supported by things like OpenStack, or even shoehorned into a VMware deployment; making things like whether or not an overlay filesystem is used an implementation detail; and while I won't need it often, and it may be an annoyance in some cases, support for signed images). So I just see nothing to imply that CoreOS is a good exponent for some idea of "simple, lightweight enterprise platform". They are providing a set of tools that individually are simple and lightweight, that you can use to start building the lower levels of an enterprise platform with, though, and understandably don't want one of those tools to grow into a platform itself (whether or not Docker will grow into that in a way that doesn't allow the core container execution mechanism to be easily lifted out, is a separate discussion).

bryanlarsen 12y ago

You've got your conclusions backwards. Docker is the one that's trying to do things the simple way. Rocket embraces the Unix process model and philosophy. They don't have to solve this particular security problem because it's been solved over almost 40 years of Unix evolution. The Docker simplicity is why they've had so much success. That's how it started: as a tool to make using LXC simpler.

apwashere 12y ago
> The Docker simplicity is why they've had so much success. That's how it started: as a tool to make using LXC simpler. Do you feel Machine, Swarm and Compose add to or detract from the value proposition of Docker, in that case? Just to ensure I'm understanding your point about Rocket benefiting from 40 years of Unix evolution correctly: do you think that Rocket will be able to remain simple as a result of this? And that Docker perhaps will not, even though up until this point it's been "trying to do things the simple way?"
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

agentultra 12y ago

It happens every time. As soon as you hit an environment where there are > 20 people using the system you need a plethora of tools and systems involved which remove the terms, "simple" and "lightweight," from the specification. Access control, authentication, auditing, operations... you can't eschew complexity by ignoring it. I've learned this time and again. If you start out with "simple" and "lightweight" you're going to hit that "enterprise wall" and really pay the price of not considering those requirements up-front. The price of either re-writes or layers of out-of-band processes and tools for orchestrating light-weight systems that were not designed to be composed in such a way. It's quite painful and terrifyingly complicated. Update: In the case of Docker/Rocket... I think these are just early iterations. I wouldn't be surprised if even Rocket becomes bloated as they realize they cannot design for simplicity when complexity is a requirement.

apwashere 12y ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if even Rocket becomes bloated as they realize they cannot design for simplicity when complexity is a requirement. That was pretty much what I was trying to get at with the question of how a "Rocket ecosystem" would address these requirements. I think vidarh makes a valid point that these could be met by tools outside the container system that are better suited...but I am curious as to what this combination of tools would be.
- agentultra 12y ago
  We just need more people experimenting and more enterprises willing to adopt some of these technologies on small, easily contained projects to get some field experience with them. I think we're finally seeing the first iterations of the operating system disappearing into the network... an idea that has been touted for some decades.
bryanlarsen 12y ago
Rocket is simple because they externalize the complexity. Rocket itself is simple and will stay simple. It's not much more than a tarball. The Rocket ecosystem will be necessarily complex.