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Comment by matt_wulfeck | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately the new buzz words of today are the boring stacks of tomorrow.

I would say that containers represent a greater leap forward in thinking than a new programming language. Like it or not your future applications will run in a linux container.

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> Unfortunately the new buzz words of today are the boring stacks of tomorrow.

Bullshit.

SOME of today's buzzwords will be boring stacks of tomorrow. But unless you're a some sort of oracle, chances are you won't be able to pick which are today, for the same reasons you shouldn't try to beat the stock market.

I don't think it's that hard to pick promising tech to explore once you have some experience under your belt. For instance, containers are super interesting to me because they directly address a lot of the pain points with dev VMs or native development. It may end up being the case that Docker does not win this battle, but it's also clear there is some meat to this hype and I will profit from learning about it even if the landscape shifts dramatically before it stabilizes.

To me you're proving his point. Containers are new hip thing right now, but it's huge amount of work to productionalize them. There are so many solutions and all of them have drawbacks. Seeing how things are going, most likely it won't be docker in the end, so the amount of effort you spent on it won't give you any edge.

From my observation it seems like docker ultimately is ending being used as another package mechanism.

I don't see how you take it that way. Experience with containers will be very valuable over the next decade, and anyone with experience will have an advantage over someone with no experience. There's not one binary moment where all of a sudden technology X is mature and stable. Docker has been around over 3 years, and the underlying technology many years before that. Although Docker is having trouble on the orchestration side, the container format is quite ubiquitous already, so I'd say it's highly unlikely that Docker will completely disappear in the medium term. Finally, it's not all or nothing, Docker solves a lot of problems today in certain configuration, you don't even necessary have to productionize anything as it's quite useful in purely dev scenarios. Even in a worst case scenario where Docker becomes completely irrelevant, you've learned something about what works and doesn't work with containers.

There's obviously a choice where you want to pick things up on the adoption curve, so maybe you're more conservative than me, but my underlying point is that it is possible to find a balance and you can still advance your skillset even if you pick something that doesn't necessarily stick around for the long haul.

Containers aren't new. FreeBSD and Solaris have had them for a decade.

> Unfortunately the new buzz words of today are the boring stacks of tomorrow

Not at all. Contrarily to many other previous innovations (e.g. virtualization) the current wave of hipster tools like Docker and the Hashicorp stuff are often looked with suspicion by engineers in large tech companies.

One of the reasons is that this stuff is heavily hyped up. Around hipster crowds adoption is more driven by "awesomeness factor" that a technical, rational discourse.

It is still worth it to delay adoption by a year or two. By then, early adopters have already stepped on most mines, flaky fads have crashed and burned, and the real winners of next generation stack-wars will have coalesced around something reseabling sustainable best practices.

I agree. Letting things shake out is an important part of not losing your hair. At the very least you come into an ecosystem with mature third-party libraries.

And documentation, or at least answers on Stackexchange. Documentation often lags behind on these new projects, especially when they're in a state of flux and you can easily find yourself pulling your hair out because the docs are for two versions ago and wrong now.

What you said was standard practice for savvy buyers of Windows for around a decade. We always told people, "Just wait till at least SP1 to buy it. You won't regret being a late adopter." We never did regret it.

I strongly disagree. There's so much flux in the new stuff that it seldom reaches the level of stability to become boring before its critical mass (if it ever had one) surfs on to the next cooler thing.

Containers are quite orthogonal to stacks. You can do LAMP, Rails, Django, Struts, MEAN on containers. It disrupts some parts of the development environment but it's back to boring pretty soon.

However if you start running your containers on AWS Lambda or the like then your stack is definitely shaken, if you can port it to there and you don't have to start anew.

> Unfortunately the new buzz words of today are the boring stacks of tomorrow.

A few will be, most will be forgotten.

"Like it or not your future applications will run in a micro kernel."

Fixed that for you ;)

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