Hacker News Reader

Comment by neals | Hacker News Reader

I see docker come around every now and then here. I'm a smalltime developer shop, small team, small webspps. What can docker do for me?

Can this reduce the time it takes me to put up and Ubuntu installation on Digital Ocean?

Is this more for larger companies ?

View on HN

Yes, Docker should be able to help you. It is definitely not just for large companies.

Docker can help you streamline your development and deployment process across all the machines, from the development laptop to the production server. The result should be that your development environment is easier to setup and replicate, more similar to production, and easier to customize as you evaluate new tools, hosting providers and software components.

I recommend checking out the "Getting started" page, it has a great online tutorial: http://www.docker.io/gettingstarted/

You should also browse through this list of real-world use cases. http://www.docker.io/community/#What-people-have-already-bui...

I hope this helps!

I just went through the Getting started tutorial. Thanks for a great intro into Docker. Is this tutorial open sourced too? What would really help is, include a few lines on how the commands can be used in real world.

Edit: The website/tutorial is open source too. https://github.com/dotcloud/www.docker.io

Thank you, I will definitely do so.

You will be able to have multiple Ubuntu servers running on one Ubuntu VPS on Digital Ocean. Each of them may have some initial state (installed some software, configuration) that you will be able to spawn as separate virtual machine. The "inside" machine will consume mnimal amount of memory (for running applications) and not for whole OS as in case of "real virtual machine". Also, you will be able to spawn and destroy new VMS very fast (under 1s).

Is it an easier to use chroot? Because I'd just use chroot if I wanted that or maybe openvz. Or just spin up a virtual node dedicated to the task I need it to perform.

It is definitely designed to be easier in several ways. One way is that it defines a format for portable container images, and an infrastructure for moving images around machines and sharing them with others. See http://www.docker.io/gettingstarted/ for an online tutorial and https://index.docker.io for the index of all community images.

What does the vm abstraction buy you vs processes? If one entity "owns" all the servers what is the draw in seperating the servers out in their own VM?

High speed, low memory consumption with proper snapshots/separation.

You don't have to think of them as VMs, that's just a simplification for the sake of the conversation. They're resource-isolated process groups. It's exactly the same idea as the original Unix-paradigm security approach of making each service run under a separate system-uid, but with a much more complete isolation.

Well, Ubuntu can do that without Docker; just with LXC. Docker uses LXC and does other things with it, but if all you want to do is run multiple lightweight Ubuntu VMs, then just use LXC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com