Docker Raises $23M

Re:Docker Raises $23M by KronisLV on Tuesday March 16, 2021 @02:12PM (#26480634)

I'd also like to know more about this, since for smaller to medium sized deployments (think 1-100 nodes, maybe running between 1-1000 containers) Docker Swarm does seem like a pretty reasonable solution, especially with tools like Portainer ( https://www.portainer.io/ ) for a web based UI to manage it.

I guess some of the reasons for the popularity of Kubernetes could be:

  - Kubernetes had Google as a big name behind it, so there was a lot of development resources put into it and eventually, lots of learning resources available, in addition to overall publicity; for example, i don't think anything like this exists for Docker Swarm https://www.katacoda.com/courses/kubernetes
  - in addition to the marketing and PR, it got picked up as a solution for many managed offerings by cloud hosts (managed Docker Swarm has almost none), a bit like what happened with serverless and AWS Lambda
  - Kubernetes allows for CRDs, has a pretty good API and has a large ecosystem built around it, to help manage its complexity (even distros like K3s and MicroK8s could be mentioned), as well as many to implement additional functionality (Istio + Kiali come to mind)
  - this further snowballed into turn-key offerings like Rancher and OpenShift that had financial incentives behind them, the idea of building a new distro that vendor locks clients into a particular company's offering, resources, support etc.
  - almost everyone (oftentimes incorrectly) believes that they need to be able to scale a lot and therefore chased the hype
  - FOMO further motivated a whole bunch of developers to use Kubernetes for their projects, instead of looking at the alternatives like Docker Swarm or Nomad
  - however, knowing Kubernetes can help to be more easily onboarded and to work with deployments in many different companies (except for when it isn't), the skills carry over nicely

Of course, some of these may be my subjective views and not at all accurate.

Personally, i think something between Docker Swarm, Nomad and K3s would be the sweet spot for containerized app deployments and orchestration, but personally i just like the Docker Compose manifests more than i do Kubernetes' and it feels like the popularity of Helm (or Kustomize) supports this line of reasoning.

Ideally we wouldn't even need containers and something like FreeBSD jails with a user friendly API around it would be sufficient. But the popularity that Docker gained seems to highlight that perhaps something was missing from those older technologies.

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Re:Docker Raises $23M by mst on Tuesday March 16, 2021 @02:32PM (#26480897)

> the popularity that Docker gained seems to highlight that perhaps something was missing from those older technologies.

I would put money on it being the Dockerfile and the developer UX around that.

I don't honestly find it any more slick to use than e.g. FreeBSD jails, but I've lived in unix for long enough that that's because I was re-using lots of knowledge I already had.

There's a comparison here to the fact that I'm perfectly comfortable writing SysV rc scripts (though BSD rc scripts are vastly more pleasant to put together) but I've watched enough people struggle their way to something that only mostly worked that I can see why for many people writing a systemd unit file instead is a vast improvement.

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Re:Docker Raises $23M by p_l on Tuesday March 16, 2021 @03:29PM (#26481680)

I think people really undervalue the base design of k8s that is responsible for the existence of CRDs and other related pluggability (even before TPR became CRDs).

Pretty much every other option was more closed and with no extensibility, plus docker swarm was plagued (at least from my PoV) with stories of instability... and I dunno about others, but I and various people I talked with were burned with running docker in production, something that k8s nicely repackaged removing a lot of the things that were problematic.

All this went into giving some serious base beyond marketing and PR - the closest I've seen from other players is classic Rancher and Nomad, and especially the latter seems much less capable.

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