Comment by figmert
9 hours ago
I'm curious what made think of it in the first place? What was your thought process that made you think that these Linux primitives give the opportunity to make it a platform for distributing and deploying packaged applications and eliminating a lot of the issue around "it works my machine" argument?
You may have already answered this somewhere, so feel free to tell me what to search for or if you have a link to hand, that works too :)
Docker was basically a commercialisation of lxc and now we got nspawn going full circle.
This is incorrect.
Docker in its earlier incarnations was based on openvz, which predates lxc. The lxc project was initially a kernel development project: a collection of kernel patches to add container support. The userland tool was just a companion. When it became apparent that these patches would "win" the race to be upstreamed even though openvz was much more mature, we switched our tooling to lxc. The patches matured over time, but the userland tool (what we now know as "lxc") was finicky.
The original open-source release of Docker wrapped lxc for low-level container operations. But it was just too unreliable and we swapped it out for an in-house Go implementation called "libcontainer".
As for "commercializing": Docker was famously bad at commercializing anything, we open sourced so much (maybe too much) and still people complained that we were not open enough.
“Docker was famously bad at commercializing anything, we open sourced so much (maybe too much) and still people complained that we were not open enough”
Developers are a tough market to please, especially when your business revolves around open source software.
Unless you have an option to do private cloud hosting (like all these databases and other platforms do), it’s incredibly difficult to monetize.
In the case of docker, I think it’s in the nature of the product that it’s difficult to monetize. Best you can do is enterprise support contracts, but those aren’t good enough to justify all that VC funding.
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In the end, how were you able to monetize Docker?
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The LXC way of getting an up per container is pretty great - I’m basic bitch with this sort of thing so I assume it’s less of an issue for the experts but really enjoyed the IP per container when I hit it.
I always liked lxc for containers. I never understood Docker. Not that I really put a lot of time into trying. These days I don't use either one.
I’m a huge fan of nspawn. Always wanted to use VMs instead of Docker and nspawn feels like a natural choice.
By nspawn you mean systemd-nspawn?[1]
[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd-nspawn
Its nice having the flexibility for both system containers and application containers. It does feel though that most people forget that nspawn does both, and that it only can do system containers.
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