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One of the things that rankles the greybeards is when people think over-hyped tools like Docker are original creations and they don't acknowledge that container

One of the things that rankles the greybeards is when people think over-hyped tools like Docker are original creations and they don't acknowledge that containerization has been around for a long time. It's not really that anyone makes this claim per se, but just a general impression fostered by the cool kids' relative youth and ignorance. We all wish that software could be judged on objective merits, but the sad truth is that now more than ever the software development world is so big that UX and marketing for dev tools actually matter a lot more. Of course over time we still gravitate towards better things as lessons are learned, but in order to figure out what the actual best tool is, huge investments need to be made to get it to work. Until millions of man hours are invested, it's impossible to say whether something like Docker will in fact be better than what came before, or whether it will peter out at another local maximum due to a fundamentally flawed philosophy. If you can't generate some initial hype then it's hard to get enough developer mindshare to even test the premise of something as complex as Docker.

digi_owl 11y ago
Bingo. More and more development around *nix seems to be coming from the desktop/website down, creating with little to no time taken to stop and look at what is already present. And even worse, when someone points out that their hot new thing breaks some age old way of doing stuff, it is the old stuff that is broken and/or archaic. Except that it is only "broken" in the presence of the new stuff, and it is the new stuff that is doing the complaining.
erikpukinskis 11y ago
What are the older examples of containers? Virtualization and chroot jails have been around forever, but LXC didn't exist until 2008 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LXC https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LXC). My beard is red, not gray, but I did a lot of years of coding and devops before I ever heard about containers. What am I missing?
- krakensden 11y ago
  Solaris Zones? OpenVZ?
  - erikpukinskis 11y ago
    Cool! Thanks for the references I had never heard of those. They don't seem to predate LXC by that much though. Solaris Zones was released in '04 and OpenVZ was started around '00 and open sourced in'06. I guess I don't consider 10-15 years a "long time" that's just approximately the amount of time necessary to turn a fundamentally new architecture concept into something you want to work with every day.
pbiggar 11y ago
> One of the things that rankles the greybeards is when people think over-hyped tools like Docker are original creations and they don't acknowledge that containerization has been around for a long time. That does rankle the greybears, but a question: why does it matter? Why does it matter that they "acknowledge that containerization has been around for a long time"? I think it's a reaction to the invading of their space by younger, hipper folk, who don't know how to set up sendmail and don't know perl, etc, etc. That is, the "get off my lawn" crowd. While I get that feeling a lot myself, esp as I get older, I try hard to push it down. What gives me the right to say that X is shit because the Xers don't know about the V and the W that came before? Secondly, I'll challenge your assertion that containers have been around for a long time. I am of course familiar with chroots, Solaris Zones, FreeBSD jails, the LXC stuff that's more recent but still significantly predates Docker, etc. However, Docker is more than prettier LXC. It's also a distribution format and a run-time for that format, and a suite of tools that works well with it. Look at Kubernetes and look at the state of the art in 2005. Not even close!

digi_owl 11y ago

Bingo. More and more development around *nix seems to be coming from the desktop/website down, creating with little to no time taken to stop and look at what is already present. And even worse, when someone points out that their hot new thing breaks some age old way of doing stuff, it is the old stuff that is broken and/or archaic. Except that it is only "broken" in the presence of the new stuff, and it is the new stuff that is doing the complaining.

erikpukinskis 11y ago

What are the older examples of containers? Virtualization and chroot jails have been around forever, but LXC didn't exist until 2008 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LXC https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LXC). My beard is red, not gray, but I did a lot of years of coding and devops before I ever heard about containers. What am I missing?

krakensden 11y ago
Solaris Zones? OpenVZ?
- erikpukinskis 11y ago
  Cool! Thanks for the references I had never heard of those. They don't seem to predate LXC by that much though. Solaris Zones was released in '04 and OpenVZ was started around '00 and open sourced in'06. I guess I don't consider 10-15 years a "long time" that's just approximately the amount of time necessary to turn a fundamentally new architecture concept into something you want to work with every day.

pbiggar 11y ago

> One of the things that rankles the greybeards is when people think over-hyped tools like Docker are original creations and they don't acknowledge that containerization has been around for a long time. That does rankle the greybears, but a question: why does it matter? Why does it matter that they "acknowledge that containerization has been around for a long time"? I think it's a reaction to the invading of their space by younger, hipper folk, who don't know how to set up sendmail and don't know perl, etc, etc. That is, the "get off my lawn" crowd. While I get that feeling a lot myself, esp as I get older, I try hard to push it down. What gives me the right to say that X is shit because the Xers don't know about the V and the W that came before? Secondly, I'll challenge your assertion that containers have been around for a long time. I am of course familiar with chroots, Solaris Zones, FreeBSD jails, the LXC stuff that's more recent but still significantly predates Docker, etc. However, Docker is more than prettier LXC. It's also a distribution format and a run-time for that format, and a suite of tools that works well with it. Look at Kubernetes and look at the state of the art in 2005. Not even close!