Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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