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Docker 1.0 Released
Graculus writes: "Docker, the company that sponsors the Docker.org open source project, is gaining allies in making its commercially supported Linux container format a de facto standard. Linux containers are a way of packaging up applications and related software for movement over the network or Internet. Once at their destination, they launch in a standard way and enable multiple containers to run under a single host operating system. 15 months and 8,741 commits after the earliest version was made public, Docker 1.0 has been released."
I thought this was about pant ... which should be at LEAST 2.0.
I can download a file from the internet and it will install and run on my computer!?
Why haven't I heard about this before??
Seriously, maybe explain why this is important for the old ones among us?
(grabs bifocals and oatmeal)
Mostly random stuff.
This is the second time Docker has appeared on Slashdot and, as before, nobody knows what it is. Is this news for nerds or a sales pitch?
"Linux containers are a way of packaging up applications and related software for movement over the network or Internet."
Rewritten not to be shitty:
"Linux containers are a way of packaging up applications and related software."
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
lol, you really have no idea what you're posting about do you.
Docker is a lot of things, all rolled up into one so it is difficult to describe without leaving out some detail. What is important to one devops person might be unimportant to another. I have been testing docker for the past few months and there are a couple of things about it that I like quite a bit.
I have to explain a couple of things that I like about it before I get to the one that I really like.
1) It has a repository of very bare bones images for ubuntu, redhat, busybox. Super bare bones, because docker only runs the bare minimum to start with and you build from that.
2) You pull down what you want to work with, and then you figuratively jump into that running image and you can set up that container with what you want it to do.
3) (this is what I really like) That working copy becomes a "diff" of the original base image. You can then save out that working image back to the repository. You can then jump on another machine, and pull down that "diff" image (but you don't even really have to think of it as a "diff", you can just think of it as your new container. docker handles all the magic of it behind the scenes. So if you are familiar with git, it provides a git like interface to managing your server images.
It does a lot more than what I describe above, but it is one of the things I was most impressed with.
How is it different?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
No, it's not.
"docker" is a man that puts his penis into another man's foreskin (it's a gay thing, don't ask). Since a lot of linux users are GLBT etc they should probably find another name.
I think of it as something like a version controlled Make or Grunt script with the output being a jail. Setting up your cloud stack as a series of Docker containers makes it much easier to create, upgrade, scale and relocate your services such as web servers, databases, caches, app servers etc.
Try clicking "Try it!" on their web page. Your container is lost at sea :/.
From the summary this seems like most OSX software: simply an icon with everything inside that you only need to drag to your Applications folder (or in the case of the OSX app store, the iconthat is downloaded). I've always liked this ultra-intuitive installation process.
so, is it a new standard for a VM, or is it a new standard for a package, or what exactly is it a new standard for? Yeah, it's a relevant XKCD.
The quality of comments on are are further proof of how far downhill /. has fallen. It's just depressing.
A couple questions pop to mind:
1. Security--how do containers, whether LXC/Docker, Jails, etc compare to true virtualization? For example, pfSense strongly argues against using virtualization in production machines not only for being slower, but for possible security risks--and a container would be even less secure than that. As an extreme scenario, what's to keep one Docker program from messing with another Docker program running under the same Docker Engine instance?
2. Will Docker only support LXC/Linux only or will it expand to support jails and such? The ability to support multiple OS containers with Docker sounds like it could be INSANELY useful!
It IS a relevant XKCD.
That said, there are good reasons to reinvent the wheel, depending on the audience, lifetime of the project, funds involved, deployment area, licensing, groups involved, and so forth.
"New" standards are not a total pain, IF they are publically documented, not restricted e.g. by patents, and having a reference implementation with code.
Color me jaded, but I will take a "new" open standard over an "old" proprietary solution any day.
There are reasons to adopt, reasons to fsck in a protected manner, and reasons to let loose.
I can see getting pissy when you have 20 adopted kids and then 5 more are forced on you out of nowhere, as a "gift."
So, it bundles up a binary and all of the shared libraries necessary for that binary, so that you don't end up in dependency hell. Great, except for what happens when the next OpenSSL vulnerability is announced, and suddenly you need to replace every container which has its own copy of OpenSSL, instead of the one shared system copy.
or a centrally managed JVM. It's a little run-time environment that works on any OS. This is not a new idea but a different language. They don't specify what the app in the container is. A better platform independent solution would be very useful.