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Comment by 4ad | Hacker News Reader

It's surprising to me as well. I think it's because of the way these technologies were marketed.

FreeBSD jails, Solaris Zones, OpenVZ, and Linux LXC were marketed as fundamental building blocks for improved consolidation and/or improved separation of concerns. These technologies could solve all these problems, but fundamentally they were sold as a transparent abstraction. "To end-users, jails operate and feel just like VMs or real hardware" they said.

Docker was different, docker was fundamentally sold as a higher-level product. Docker is not "just like real hardware", docker was a new way to think about deployment, a new way to think about pre-packaged building blocks.

Docker is operationally different.

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I think it has a lot to do with marketing and hype.

The BSD community in general is anti-hype, vs. Docker having a for-profit company (dotCloud) behind it. Even it's first version's website looked nice, had a lot of pretty graphics.

It really does more than people think. Now, the following statement doesn't apply to Docker, but I've seen people with great technical understanding seen choosing totally messy toy projects, because they had a well designed website with pretty images and lots of marketing.

I mean to some degree this also works for Docker in the sense that I've seen people having totally wrong expectations on what Docker does.

It's just what good marketing does: Giving people the impression that something is magic.

The BSD communities always had both a strong no-hype stances. They didn't even have cool names, as they have now with bhyve, etc. They also had a strong "keep it simple" mindset, that counters the "there is magic behind it" effect. It is the sysadmin mindset of preferring boringness and no surprises.

The only other bigger open source project I know trying to be boring to some(!) degree is Go. But that only works, because you can always say "it's from Google" if you need to market it.

Of course there are others, but many of them are way less known.

The only other _somewhat_ new software that I can think of that was considered cool without there being a big hype machine and/or a company pushing it from the beginning is Redis. Out of the nowhere, I mean. Of course there is much cool stuff done by people that already have proven to do amazing things.

But I am sure other people can come up with way more.

Having used both plain LXC and BSD Jails before Docker was a thing, and now using Docker after, I can say much of this is true. But there's a fundamental additional point: Docker's marketing has increased its' usage for application development in general, and now it has become technically useful because of the resulting ecosystem they grew around that. Docker Hub is quite useful if you just want to deploy some app quickly -- usually it's already been done for you.

That's an interesting way of looking at it. Docker also came with a way to do things. Jails you were still responsible for having it set up correctly (though you could tar them which was nice).

> That's an interesting way of looking at it. Docker also came with a way to do things. Jails you were still responsible for having it set up correctly (though you could tar them which was nice).

Separate kernel and OS is ideal for containers, IMO. What was thought to be a plus with BSD I believe turned out to be a weakness.

Containers don't haver separate kernels.

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