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Should Docker Move To a Non-Profit Foundation?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the ask-a-silly-question dept.

darthcamaro writes "Docker has become the new hotness in virtualization technology — but it is still a project that is led by the backing of a single vendor — Docker Inc. Is that a problem? Should there be an open-source Foundation to manage the governance and operation of the Docker project? In a video interview — Docker founder and Benevolent Dictator for Life Solomon Hykes says — No."

1 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No one cares enough to build a competitor. by csirac · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Before docker, as a (not necessarily web) developer I used vagrant to create reproducible environments and build artefacts from a very small set of files. The goal being: I should be able to git clone a very tiny repo tracking a few KiB of scripts and declartiive stuff/config, which - when run - pulls down dependencies, reproduces a build toolchain/environment, performs the build, and delivers substantially identical artefacts regardless of which machine I run it from. I should be able look at an artefact in 2-3 years time, look it up in our version history and reproduce it easily.

    Achieving this isn't so easy. Even if I had been using LXC all along I still wouldn't have had the main thing from Dockerfiles that I enjoy: cached build steps. I've been cornered due to time pressures in the past where I can't afford to tweak everything nicely so I've had to release build artefacts from a process which isn't captured in the automation (i.e. I manually babysat the build to meet a requirement on time). This is because hour-long builds make for maybe 3-4 iterations per day, so you have one thread of work where you're hacking interactively while you wait to see if the automation was able to deliver the result you were up to an hour or two ago. I still have this to an extent with Docker (adjust build step and re-run, or step in interactively to explore what's needed) but because Dockerfile steps are cached these iterations are massively accelerated and there's only a handful of occasions where I had to bypass this process now.

    I can't speak for using Docker to actually containerize running applications (that's not how I use it), but just this narrow usage of Docker has helped my productivity enormously.