Comment by landerwust | Hacker News Reader

Comment by landerwust | Hacker News Reader

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This was always a land-grab by folk who wanted Docker's """community""" (read: channel) but not Docker's commercial interests. Any time you see a much larger commercial entity insist you write a spec for your technology, especially one with much larger pockets, the writing is always on the cards.

The bit that absolutely fucking sickens me is how these transactions are often dressed up in language with free software intonations like "community", "collaboration" etc. Institutionalized doublethink is so thick in the modern free software world that few people even recognize the difference any more. As an aside, can anyone remember not so long ago when Google wouldn't shut up about "the open web"? Probably stopped saying that not long after Chrome ate the entire ecosystem and began dictating terms.

The one mea culpa for Docker is that the sales folk behind Kubernetes haven't the slightest understanding of the usability story that made Docker such a raging success to begin with. The sheer size of the organizations they represent may not even allow them to recreate that experience if indeed they recognized the genius of it. It remains to be seen whether they'll manage that before another orchestrator comes along and changes the wind once again. The trophy could still be stolen, there's definitely room for it.

Meh.

The whole idea of containerization came from Google anyways, who uses it internally. Docker came out with their container system without understanding what made it work so well for Google. They then discovered the hard way that the whole point of containers is to not matter, which makes it hard to build a business on them.

Docker responded by building up a whole ecosystem and doing everything that they could to make Docker matter. Which makes them a PITA to use. (One which you might not notice if you internalize their way of doing things and memorize their commands.)

One of my favorite quotes about Docker was from a Linux kernel developer. It went, "On the rare occasions when they manage to ask the right question, they don't understand the answer."

I've seen Docker be a disaster over and over again. The fact that they have a good sales pitch only makes it worse because more people get stuck with a bad technology.

Eliminating Docker from the equation seems to me to be an unmitigated Good Thing.

> The whole idea of containerization came from Google anyways, who uses it internally.

Not really. Jails and chroots are a form of containerization and have existed for a long time. Sun debuted containers (with Zones branding) as we think of them today long before Google took interest, and still years before Docker came to the forefront.

> I've seen Docker be a disaster over and over again. The fact that they have a good sales pitch only makes it worse because more people get stuck with a bad technology.

> Eliminating Docker from the equation seems to me to be an unmitigated Good Thing.

Now this I agree with, Docker is a wreck. Poor design, bad tooling, and often downright hostile to the needs of their users. Docker is the Myspace of infra tooling and the sooner they croak, the better.

What Google pioneered was the idea of defining how to build a bunch of containers, building them, deploying them together to a cloud, and then having them talk to each other according to preset rules.

Yes, we had chroot, jails, and VMs long before. I'd point to IBM's 360 model 67 which was released in 1967 as the earliest example that I'm aware of. A typical use before containerazation was shared hosting. But people thought of and managed those as servers. Maybe servers with some scripting, but still servers.

I'm not aware of anyone prior to Google treating them as disposable units that were built and deployed at scale according to automated rules. There is a significant mind shift from "let's give you a pretend server" to, "let's stand up a service in an automated way by deploying it with its dependency as a pretend server that you network together as needed". And another one still to, "And let's create a network operating system to manage all services across all of our data centers." And another one still to standardize on a practices that let any data center can go down at any time with no service disruption, and any 2 can go down with no bigger problems than increased latency.

Google standardized all of that years before I heard "containerization" whispered by anyone outside of Google.

Containers came from Solaris and the BSDs, and the warehouse-sized containerized deploys that this article/changelog is associated with came from Google. You're both right.

And agreed, Docker is a mess. It seems like everything that's good about Docker was developed by other companies, and everything that's bad about Docker was developed by Docker. The sooner the other companies can write Docker out of the picture the better. I want the time I wasted on Swarm back.

I get preferring that major open sourced projects weren't controlled by a big corporation, but this seems overly dramatic.

Docker was always a company first and foremost, I fail to see how leaving the technology in their commercial control would have been better in any way than making it an open standard. Just because Docker = small = good and Google = giant corporation = evil? Docker raised huge amounts of VC funding, they had every intention of becoming a giant corporation themselves.

And it's kind of bizarre to completely discount the outcome of this situation, which is that we have amazing container tools that are free and open and standardized, just because you don't like some of the parties involved in getting to this point.

> making it an open standard

I would hesitate to use the term "open standard" until I'd thoroughly assessed the identities of everyone contributing to that open spec, along with those of their employers, and what history the spec has of accepting genuinely "community" contributions (in the 1990s sense of that word)

The container image/runtime/distribution area is heavily standardized now via the Open Container Initiative (OCI) that was founded 5 years ago.

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/2015/12/open-c... https://kubernetes.io/blog/2016/12/container-runtime-interfa...

You can see the releases and specs that are supported by all major container runtimes here: https://opencontainers.org/release-notices/overview/

For example, OpenShift ships https://cri-o.io in its kubernetes distribution as its container runtime, so this isn't really new.

Disclosure: I helped start OCI and CNCF

I've never tried contributing to CRI so I don't really know what the process is like. I imagine like any such large and established standard it would require a herculean effort, that doesn't necessarily mean it's not open just that it can't possibly accept any random idea that comes along and still continue to serve its huge user base.

But let's say you're right and call it a closed standard. Then this change drops support for one older, clunkier closed standard in favor of the current closed standard. Still doesn't seem like anything to get upset over.

> This was always a land-grab by...

What's "this" in that sentence? Kubernetes in general?

The standardization of “Docker” containers into “OCI” containers and the huge amount of public pressure put on Docker to separate out their runtime containerd from dockerd.

Do you think it shouldn't have been standardized so other vendors products could be interoperable with docker's containers, or just that the standardization should have been done differently, or other?

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