Microsoft Acquires Container Platform Deis From Engine Yard (techcrunch.com)

According to an announcement made earlier today, Microsoft has acquired Deis, "the company behind some of the most popular tools for building and managing applications on top of the Google-incubated Kubernetes container orchestration service," writes Frederic Lardinois via TechCrunch. From the report: "At Microsoft, we've seen explosive growth in both interest and deployment of containerized workloads on Azure, and we're committed to ensuring Azure is the best place to run them," Microsoft's executive VP for its cloud and enterprise group Scott Guthrie writes today. "To support this vision, we're pleased to announce that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Deis -- a company that has been at the center of the container transformation." Deis provides three core open-source tools for managing Kubernetes deployments: Workflow, a platform for developers and operations teams to easily deploy and manage containerized apps; the Kubernetes package manager Helm; and Steward, a Kubernetes-native service broker (which basically allows applications to talk to each other). Like similar companies, its business model relies on providing paid support and training for these applications. The team will continue to work on these open-source tools, which are currently in use by the likes of Mozilla, CloudMine and SocialRadar.

Comments

What the hell do containers even do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Other than to give you an excuse to talk about your nice dockers like you have a python in your pants?

Sure it's great that physical servers have tons of memory and storage so physical servers can virtualize smaller virtual servers. And if I need a virtual server for something, I spin up a virtual server and I run software on it. But virtualization is enough of a pain in the ass when it doesn't work right. Why would I want containers to add yet another level of abstraction getting in my way.

Re:What the hell do containers even do?

[jopsen]

Because you can avoid virtualization... You only have worry about the bits inside your container... Which unlike a VM you can build locally.. building VMs is a hassle..

Re:What the hell do containers even do?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

... if I need a virtual server for something, I spin up a virtual server and I run software on it. But virtualization is enough of a pain in the ass when it doesn't work right. Why would I want containers to add yet another level of abstraction getting in my way.

Because containers are lighter weight than virtual servers but still get what you want done. You still have only one "extra level of abstraction" but it's less of a pain.

A virtual server is a whole virtual machine, with its own copy of the OS, its own file system with all the libraries and utilities, etc.

A container is a package containing your application and designating how much of which version of the OS, libraries, file system, utilities, etc. it gets to see. It looks to the app like it's running on its own little machine, just like in a VM. But it's actually running (along with everything else) under the native Linux kernel, which is using several compartmentalization mechanisms to give the app its own, limited and tuned, view of task numbers, file system, tables, etc.

It's a sandbox, something like a chroot jail, except instead of just compartmentalizing the file system (to show a version that limits the app's view and shows it its own versions of libraries and such) it does the same thing to stuff like the processor, task environment, available devices, etc.

Re:What the hell do containers even do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Additionally, Containers are especially important to Continuous Integration platforms such as "Travis CI" when do programming/development;

Via containers, we can test our code base against multiple versions at the same time - without requiring a different VM for each version;
i.e: Running a separate container for each of: PHP 5.4, PHP 5.5, PHP 5.6 & PHP 7 - all these running on the same VM instance, and testing code against them.

Additionally for Sys Admins for example, they may want to run IIS & Apache in containers, so they're sandboxed from each other.

Personally, I see containers as the next evolution beyond Virtual Machines, and they're tremendously useful.

Re:What the hell do containers even do?

[swb]

A container is a package containing your application and designating how much of which version of the OS, libraries, file system, utilities, etc. it gets to see. It looks to the app like it's running on its own little machine, just like in a VM. But it's actually running (along with everything else) under the native Linux kernel, which is using several compartmentalization mechanisms to give the app its own, limited and tuned, view of task numbers, file system, tables, etc.

This is where I get lost with containers vs. virtualization. How does a container choose what version of the OS it gets to use if it runs under a given OS? The library aspects I think I get, assuming you're able to install multiple copies of the libraries or apps in question in the OS.

Or is that the part I don't get -- it's more like an app build process, where you essentially compile the app and install its binaries and linked libraries, including system libraries into the container? I guess this makes sense, but then I don't get how you're able to obtain OS portability for containers without essentially throwing every bit of the OS into the container it might need. Or do they not have OS portability, and the container is more or less locked to the OS it was built under?

At some point I'm curious how containers aren't just basically a method of obtaining what amounts to a statically linked binary with FS jails and networking baked into the container host.

Re:What the hell do containers even do?

[UnknownSoldier]

Here, literally, is the big picture

Or working around /.'s shitty lameness filter, some ASCII art:

| Application. . |
| DLLs . . . . . | | Application. |
| Operating Sys. | | DLLs . . . . |
| Virtual Machine| | Container . .|
| Operating Sys .| | Operating Sys|

--
Slashdot's lameness filter is lame. When the fuck are tables and markdown going to be supported???

Re:What the hell do containers even do?

[trybywrench]

A container is a package containing your application and designating how much of which version of the OS, libraries, file system, utilities, etc. it gets to see. It looks to the app like it's running on its own little machine, just like in a VM. But it's actually running (along with everything else) under the native Linux kernel, which is using several compartmentalization mechanisms to give the app its own, limited and tuned, view of task numbers, file system, tables, etc.

This is where I get lost with containers vs. virtualization. How does a container choose what version of the OS it gets to use if it runs under a given OS? The library aspects I think I get, assuming you're able to install multiple copies of the libraries or apps in question in the OS.

Or is that the part I don't get -- it's more like an app build process, where you essentially compile the app and install its binaries and linked libraries, including system libraries into the container? I guess this makes sense, but then I don't get how you're able to obtain OS portability for containers without essentially throwing every bit of the OS into the container it might need. Or do they not have OS portability, and the container is more or less locked to the OS it was built under?

At some point I'm curious how containers aren't just basically a method of obtaining what amounts to a statically linked binary with FS jails and networking baked into the container host.

It all pretty much started here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:What the hell do containers even do?

[kwerle]

You ought to spend a couple of hours with docker.

Dockerfile
---
# base system is Ubuntu 16.04
FROM ubuntu:16.04

# use /my/app to build
WORKDIR /my/app

# copy this directory (and all subs)
COPY . .

# Build my project (inside the container)
RUN ./configure
RUN make
RUN ...

# Run my app on container start
CMD "./bin/my_app"
---

docker built -t my_app_container .
docker run my_app_container

What you will end up with is a container that has ubuntu 16.04 running your built application. And it will ONLY be running your application. Nothing else. If you
docker exec -it {running_container} bash
you will get a bash shell in your running container. It will be running two processes - your app and the bash shell.

So, yeah, it's kinda locked to the OS you specify - but you can change it up (https://www.brianchristner.io/docker-image-base-os-size-comparison/).

At some point I'm curious how containers aren't just basically a method of obtaining what amounts to a statically linked binary with FS jails and networking baked into the container host.

I can run a container on any OS that hosts docker.

By dockerifying my project, I can tell any developer that they need to follow 4 steps to be up and developing:
1. Install docker
2. Check out the project
3. Build the container (docker command)
4. Run the container (docker command)

And that's it. They can use whatever editor they want on their system. They can use whatever OS they want that hosts docker. And when it's time to deploy we use the same container they are using to do development. It removes all the tricky shit about getting environments right and mysteries about deployment. And it tosses developer's favorite OS question out the window. It's kind of magical.

Re:What the hell do containers even do?

[jopsen]

Bare metal on-demand is becoming a thing checkout packet.net or scaleway.com
Sure, they don't have the infrastructure or services to complete with AWS yet, but they are both adding block storage options.. scaleway even seems to adding blob storage similar to S3.

With containers and qubernetes I can see virtualization on it's way out... Well, at-least in the cases where you want to squeeze out the last bit of performance.

That headline though

[TWX]

"Microsoft Acquires Container Platform Deis From Engine Yard"

This literally sounds like a piece of rusty railroad rolling stock was bought from an old railyard and dragged away.

Re:That headline though

[freeze128]

I was sure Microsoft was getting into the shipping business.

Re:That headline though

[Godwin O'Hitler]

I read the summary and it still sounds like that.