Well, before Docker I used to work on Xen and that possible future of massive block devices assembled using Vagrant and Packer has thankfully been avoided...
One thing that's hard to capture in the article -- but that permeated the early Dockercons -- is the (positive) disruption Docker had in how IT shops were run. Before that going to production was a giant effort, and 'shipping your filesystem' quickly was such a change in how people approached their work. We had so many people come up to us grateful that they could suddenly build services more quickly and get them into the hands of users without having to seek permission slips signed in triplicate.
We're seeing the another seismic cultural shift now with coding agents, but I think Docker had a similar impact back then, and it was a really fun community spirit. Less so today with the giant hyperscalars all dominating, sadly, but I'll keep my fond memories :-)
Great point about coding agents! Back then, Docker gave us 'it works on my machine, let's ship the machine'. Now, AI agents are giving us 'I have no idea how this works, let's ship the prompt'. The early Docker community spirit really was legendary though—before every hyperscaler wrapped it in 7 layers of proprietary managed services. Thanks for the memories and the write-up!
Thanks for the kind words! I've been prodding @justincormack to resurrect the single most fun OS unconference I've ever attended -- New Directions in Operating Systems (last held back in 2014). https://operatingsystems.io
Some of those talks strangely make more sense today (e.g. Rump Kernels or unikernels + coding agents seems like a really good combination, as the agent could search all the way through the kernel layers as well).
I think you're too concerned with how others speak to believe that someone can actually write good, well-written comments. Obviously, in the age of LLMs, we might use one or two things to produce a better response. But that doesn't mean I don't think about what I wrote. Especially since English isn't my native language. Anyway, don't worry about me!
And those lightweight VM base images are possible because Docker applied a downward pressure on OS base image sizes! Alpine Linux doesn't get enough credit for this; in addition to being a great base image, it was also the first distro to prioritise fast and small image creation (Gentoo and Arch were small, but not fast to create).
There's also the part where you have a much easier time building alpine packages inside a container rather than a VM. There is no docker run equivalent that lets you quickly run a shell script inside the deployment Linux distribution to build the package.
It's not as easy; a block device has to be bootable and so usually bundles a kernel (large). And because the filesystem inside is opaque, you can't do layering like Docker does easily via overlayfs and friends. libguestfs does a heroic job of making VM images easier to manipulate from code, but it's an uphill battle...
Professor Madhavapeddy, am I understanding your comment correctly? "without having to seek permission slips signed in triplicate", the motivation to create Docker was because of IT bureaucracy?
Well, before Docker I used to work on Xen and that possible future of massive block devices assembled using Vagrant and Packer has thankfully been avoided...
One thing that's hard to capture in the article -- but that permeated the early Dockercons -- is the (positive) disruption Docker had in how IT shops were run. Before that going to production was a giant effort, and 'shipping your filesystem' quickly was such a change in how people approached their work. We had so many people come up to us grateful that they could suddenly build services more quickly and get them into the hands of users without having to seek permission slips signed in triplicate.
We're seeing the another seismic cultural shift now with coding agents, but I think Docker had a similar impact back then, and it was a really fun community spirit. Less so today with the giant hyperscalars all dominating, sadly, but I'll keep my fond memories :-)