It turns out developer experience matters.

Docker (the software, not the company) and Stripe are two of the best recent examples of that.

Definitely not, IMO linux "containers" succeeded in spite of their shortcomings (as compared to jails/zones).

What Docker did is make a great application packaging tool, and the fact that it uses cgroups/namespaces underneath is irrelevant for 99% of users, because they're deploying containers in VMs.

Docker got popular because a lot of devs gave up on packaging (and declared dependencies and shared libraries) and instead want jails (and isolation and static linking). Now it's self-perpetuating, because it's very easy to put packages into containers but it's hard to package containerized software for use in an ordinary unified namespace (no container).

They gave up on packaging because its a nightmare that never ends. Conflicts, missing dependencies, old versions or no version available for your distro because of course there isn't just one package format.

Docker is still an over-engineered solution to this problem, but its popularity is evidence that there is in fact a problem.

Yep, the question was "package it as what?", and the answer was rarely ever "a statically linked linux executable."

This created the need for piles of configuration management or machine build scripts to deploy the app.

Packaging and jails are simply the means to an end: distribute and run applications.

Docker became popular because it provides an abstraction that simply (and elegantly) eliminates the problem of distributing and running server applications.

No I don't think he meant that. I know countless numbers of users that are familiar with the Docker cli and exactly 0 of them that know how to manipulate kernel namespaces, cgroups, lxc, etc. manually. Not a thing in the developer community. Docker is what makes that stuff useful and usable. As low level primitives they are fine but they'd never be used that widely without something like Docker. Clearly they depend on each other but they are not the same thing. Also there's more to Docker than just that. E.g. the layered filesystem is hugely important.

Let me know when LXC and kernel namespaces are portable across Windows and macOS and I can use the same interface between all three with my coworkers.

You're being purposefully obtuse for snark points.

Right. This is why they use a VM on other platforms.

In general, I always try to give the contrarian opinion as it causes an interesting discussion between the community members.

Also, there are some young members here, that might not realize that what we see as "innovation" might happened before (multiple times).

The truth is actually in the middle.

I could care less about the points.

That's why when someone says "the Tesla model S is a game changing innovation!" I say "you mean, electric motors and batteries are a great innovation!"

Innovation doesn’t have to be 100% hard tech. Tesla built a product using a mix of existing technologies and improved ones, great product design and great marketing, and together all of that changed the industry. The innovation is the whole package.

Docker had the right mix of existing tech, good packaging, great user interface, and good marketing. And together that made a product that made developers do new things in practice, and it changed the industry.

I think it is important to remind people that in order to disrupt an industry with a new thing, you need the whole package. Not just a good tech.

My comment was sarcasm.

This is a tired argument compared to what Docker introduced. Should we not commend Apple for the iPhone because the rotary phone was invented years before?

Don't forget about chroot. That's been around since the 70's...

That's not entirely fair. Yes, LXC/OpenVZ is cool and does some awesome container stuff, but part of what makes docker so neat is more than just containerization. Everything is "stateless"; you can reproduce environments exactly across machines with dockerfiles and as such it lends itself well for local development, but also distributed deployment (such as docker swarm).

Dockerfile provides as much reproducible environment as bash shell script.

This is why I have beef with docker, it was marketed to solve multiple things, but ultimately it becomes over-glorified zip file. It absolutely fails in reproducibility and I constantly see scenarios where Dockerfile that worked one day broke another day, or it worked on one machine and broke on another and so on.

Yes, you can put extra effort and make your dockerfile reproducible, but similarly you can make a reproducible bash script.

Yes. But I guess in 5 years or less there will be another runtime (especially now that the company is basically dissolved), while namespaces, etc will stay.

I don't know that that's true; Google and Microsoft seem to have really started betting on Docker and, for better or for worse, they are big trend-setting companies, so I suspect it's more likely that one of them would purchase it and continue working on it before it just goes away.

Google and Microsoft have really started betting on containerization. Neither has really started betting on Docker.

Considering Google, Azure, AWS, DO, IBM and others all have cloud offerings centered around Kubernetes with Docker compatible containers, even if some of the tooling changes, I don't expect that "Docker" will really go anywhere. I would be surprised if the next step doesn't have it swallowed by one of the above companies (probably not DO though).

Even for AWS Lambda, I use docker to build linux lambda packages on non-linux environments (docker for windows/mac). The easiest way to get a service up in Elastic Beanstalk is with a Dockerfile.

Even if Docker (organization) does die, Docker (open source tooling) will live on for a very long time. And although I do like where podman and others are coming from, I don't think that it will displace docker in the long run.

Boot2Kube Linux distros will be the norm

One of the daemonless tools out there now or some interface specifically for Kube will exist as a dependency

Docker is more than just a runtime.