The use case for our startup is: we have lots of compute and graphics intensive services being created and tested on Macs by developers, targeted for Linux Docker instances in the cloud. It would be nice to be able to run these same containers natively on OS X rather than requiring developers to bring up a local hypervisor (e.g. VirtualBox) and a local virtual Linux instance). This would help with both dev and test. Additionally, sometimes our engineers would like to be able to run compute jobs locally and merge the results back into the cloud based system.

Get your developers to run Linux natively?

That sounds like a difficult proposition without your target being able to run Mac binaries.

Having some sort of translation that's not a VM as a part of the distribution mechanism doesn't make much sense, and breaking the portability of Docker comes at a significant cost.

I struggle to see how to make that work cleanly.

I think you're interpreting his words too literally. Nothing that gets deployed to a QA/staging/production system should be built on a developer's workstation in the first place, those specific containers need to come off a build server. The binaries on the developer's workstation would be built on/for OS X, and the binaries in QA/staging/production on the (Linux) build server for (Linux) targets.

> Are there Mac servers out there you want to run apps on? Or just consumer apps you want to run on your mac? Curious about the use case!

Maybe they haven't but I feel like Apple has abandoned the Mac OS X Server so no apps at least for me in that case but I think consumer apps would be a pretty cool use case.

> VMs are that abstraction today. I think we can do better going forward, but still a lot to do with what we currently have planned.

Roger; thanks!

I second the opinion regarding OSX servers; not only is Xserve long dead but the "server" component of OSX is an application that bundles mostly open source applications with a GUI, if I'm not mistaken?

This appears to be aimed at SOHO users and not racks and racks of servers in a data centre.

Is there a public roadmap for currently planned features? I know there was discussion to make Docker more community driven, but I'm not sure if that went anywhere?

I saw this... https://www.docker.com/community/governance/ but couldn't find any more information...

Docker is already pretty community driven. But given the level of impact, we think we need to make it even more robust and have some proposals.

The first DGAB meeting is on 10/28, where we will propose a different way of working based on all of the feedback.

Stay tuned. We'll have a lot on this in the upcoming weeks.