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Docker and CoreOS Join Together For Open Container Project At Linux Foundation

Posted by samzenpus on from the working-together dept.

darthcamaro writes: The great schism in the container world is now at an end. Today, Docker and CoreOS, announced along with Amazon Web Services, Apcera, Cisco, EMC, Fujitsu, Goldman Sachs, Google, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Joyent, the Linux Foundation, Mesosphere, Microsoft, Pivotal, Rancher Labs, Red Hat and VMware the Open Container Project, as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. The new effort will focus specifically on libcontainer — providing a baseline for a container runtime. "By participating with Docker and all the other folks in the OCP, we're getting the best of all worlds," Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS told eWEEK. "We're getting the contributions from Docker with the format and runtime that underpin container usage, and then we're also getting the shared standard and vendor neutrality aspects that we've designed with app container."

3 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. Containers can be VMs *or* apps, Docker. by allquixotic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Unless this unified "Open Container Project" supports both the unprivileged, isolated "machine" concept of a container AND the trusted, shared "app" concept of a container, it's going nowhere fast for me.

    Solaris Zones. linux-vserver containers. Now Canonical's lxd. Few of the participants in the container effort, except these three, seem to understand the value of having containers as *machines*. Give each machine its own static IP, isolate all its resources (memory, processes, users and groups, files, networking, etc.) from the other containers on the system, and you have what's basically a traditional VM (in the early 2000s sense of the word), but with a lot less overhead, because no hypervisor and only one centralized kernel.

    Docker seems to pretend like VM-style containers don't (or shouldn't) exist. I disagree fundamentally with that. I dislike that Docker pushes containers so hard while ignoring this very important use case. I hope the rest of the Linux Foundation is smart enough to recognize the value of this use case and support it.

    If not, I'll just have to hope that Canonical's lxd continues to mature and improve.

  2. Different from Jails? by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Can someone break it down how this is different from Jails? I have almost a dozen different jails on my FreeNAS machine serving everything from nginx to iPython.

    1. Re:Different from Jails? by rycamor · · Score: 1, Interesting

      So what we have is an insanely more complicated way to manage your "VM-ish" things, a really, really odd way of approaching your containerized system where it doesn't actually get to have a full userland (no SSHd, etc...) unless you do all sorts of insane tweaks (believe me, I know because I spent the better part of last year doing this), and in the end the only real advantage of Docker over jails has nothing to do with the intrinsic design of the system, but the build infrastructure surrounding it?

      That sound about right. All FreeBSD needs to compete with Linux containers is an image repository and a Git-like method for managing and building images. There are already tons of jail management tools for snapshotting, migrating, moving, templating, etc... And given that jails have a much longer history and are likely to be much more stable and easy to manage, it seems like a natural next step, BSD guys. Hint, hint...