Re:Docker Is Raising Funding at $1.3B Valuation
by icebraining on Friday August 18, 2017 @03:56PM
(#15049249)
I think that essentially, the LXD project focuses on making VM-like containers (with a full OS that you SSH into, etc), whereas Docker and friends focus on immutable application containers - essentially, a zone for running a single application, and which you delete and start from scratch rather than entering and changing stuff.
In fact, the LXD people have a guide on how to run Docker containers inside LXD :)
Re:Docker Is Raising Funding at $1.3B Valuation
by Silhouette on Friday August 18, 2017 @04:44PM
(#15049584)
I understand that the focus/brand of Docker is aimed at a slightly different scenario.
What I'm not seeing is why -- from an objective, technical point of view -- you couldn't do almost any of the same things with plain LXC these days, perhaps with LXD on top if the vanilla UI for setting things up isn't sufficient.
I mean, Docker Hub and some nice UI tools are great and all, but I don't see a USP or a defensible position worth a billion dollar valuation in there. So what is really behind the confidence that investors at this level must surely have?
Re:Docker Is Raising Funding at $1.3B Valuation
by eatmyshorts on Friday August 18, 2017 @05:42PM
(#15049983)
Yes, you can do this with most other container systems. But people haven't done this, except with Docker. Docker has a significant lead on competitors. People have little reason to adopt a competitor as a result.
Re:Docker Is Raising Funding at $1.3B Valuation
by Silhouette on Friday August 18, 2017 @06:25PM
(#15050229)
OK, but presumably most of those people also aren't paying anything to Docker-the-business for using it right now. If they want to be worth billions, there will have to be real revenues sooner or later, and at that point whoever is paying does have an incentive to look at competitors. So at the risk of repeating myself, I'm still wondering what they have as a USP or other effective barrier to competitors stealing away their market share as fast as they built it up. Surely there must be something if investors are actually going in at this level, and I'm very curious to know what it might be.
I haven't set up enough systems to have a strong opinion on this one myself, but those I know who definitely have seem to come down in favour of plain LXC and possibly LXD in most scenarios. Typically, their argument is that the features you probably want are there anyway, and so the extra weight of the Docker ecosystem now seems to introduce more irritations than it fixes.
Sometimes they seem to distinguish between hosting on infrastructure like AWS and setting up containers with colo or closer-to-home managed hosting. I don't understand the subtleties here; can anyone enlighten me about why they might go with Docker in one case but be quite strongly against it in the other?