There is hype around docker, for sure. The optimist in me likes to think that it's because people find the project useful and are excited about the possibilities of containers in general - which I believe are huge.
Me and the dotCloud team have been working on container technology since 2008. For a long time it felt like preaching in the desert - mostly because it required exotic patches to the kernel which made widespread adoption difficult. So it's very rewarding to see more people adopt containers, and of course it's great to be on the right side of the hype for a change. But if we hadn't been at the right place at the right time, someone else would have done it instead. Containers are just too important and useful to not blow up.
Could you share some thoughts (or links) on the differences between LXC and linux-vserver? I played a little bit with that, and it seemed to promise "true jails" for Linux -- and LXC seems to be a natural successor -- any comment of what we've gained/lost from the "transition"?
I'd also love to hear what people think about the relationship between freebsd+jails, solaris+zones and Linux+LXC/docker and/or if it would make sense to modularize the back-end so that "docker" (as in the daemon/management tools) would work for maintaining jails and/or zones as well?
It'd be fun to be able to run docker+LXC under GNU Debian/Linux, and docker+jails under GNU Debian/kFreebsd (and ditto for the Debian-like/Ubunut-based solaris distros)... Maybe not useful, but interesting...
> Could you share some thoughts (or links) on the differences between LXC and linux-vserver?
vserver, lxc and openvz were 3 competing projects to add process-level isolation to the linux kernel. We used all 3 of them extensively (the ancestor of docker was based on vserver, then ported to openvz, then finally to lxc). They all had pros and cons, but in the end the only meaningful difference is that lxc got merged upstream, and the others didn't.
> would make sense to modularize the back-end so that "docker" (as in the daemon/management tools) would work for maintaining jails and/or zones as well?
Absolutely. That is the goal, and starting with 0.8 Docker's architecture will be modular enough to support it.
There is hype around docker, for sure. The optimist in me likes to think that it's because people find the project useful and are excited about the possibilities of containers in general - which I believe are huge.
Me and the dotCloud team have been working on container technology since 2008. For a long time it felt like preaching in the desert - mostly because it required exotic patches to the kernel which made widespread adoption difficult. So it's very rewarding to see more people adopt containers, and of course it's great to be on the right side of the hype for a change. But if we hadn't been at the right place at the right time, someone else would have done it instead. Containers are just too important and useful to not blow up.