Re:Goodbye Docker and Thanks for all the Fish
by user5994461 on Sunday March 10, 2019 @01:04PM
(#19352885)
Agreed.
I'm not sure that dotcloud and App Engine though were the right products though.
They have shown that a fully managed cloud solution is not the answer. Barely no company could use it, let alone migrate existing software to a whole new platform. It's limited to a very small niche.
Docker and Kubernetes are standalone products. Companies can use them internally and make it work with what they already have.
That's actually how they started -- they were a PaaS called dotCloud before they were Docker!
This was before the term "orchestration" became common, but the point was that they were running apps in multiple languages. They were like Heroku except they supported more than one language (back when Heroku was basically Rails apps).
They didn't get much traction and had to pivot to Docker. I think the underlying reason is that writing a PaaS / distributed OS like Kubernetes is extremely difficult, and they were spread too thin. They didn't really nail a single use case like Heroku nailed Rails apps. They were trying to run everything and ended up running nothing.
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This "rhyming" of history makes me smile, and makes me think how important timing is. dotCloud was the right product, done too early and done poorly. Docker was arugably the wrong product at the right time! I say "wrong" because I never thought it was a sustainable product or business, but it did come about at a time when people really needed a quick and dirty solution.
And now the surrounding ecosystem has changed drastically and I agree with the OP that Docker may be left out of it.
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Another thing I find funny is that App Engine was already "serverless" 10+ years ago... you wrote Python apps and uploaded them as .zip files (web or batch processing). You didn't manage virtual machines. So somehow they were also a bit early, and maybe the product was lacking in some ways as a result.