It's designed to be a key building block for anyone who wants to create their own PaaS-like service or environment. Why would you need your own PaaS? You might have unique security requirements forcing you to run an app in-house, or you might not want to pay the high prices of a commercial PaaS if your app gets popular.
Containers are an isolation mechanism. They aren't virtual machines. More of a distant cousin to chroot or a jail.
The target audiences are developers and operations. It's a packaging/deployment tool.
What I do to run applications is this: I fire up a vm or dedicated server on some provider and run my stuff on it. I use Amazon and a couple of other providers.
Nice job so far. Where do you see this heading to? What's your view of what will happen in the virtualization world?
Best,
What I personally care most about? As a designer ex-entrepreneur and front-end developer, the thing that gets me going most is the idea that I'm able to "just run" an application. No more difficult than from the Mac store. For example Trac (a wiki system), Wordpress, Django apps, Mailservers, torrent-servers. Basic stuff which just makes it easier for me to deploy my creations, and those of others.
But seriously, nice job. I haven't used docker yet because I want to play around with the standard lxc utilities first. But this is pretty awesome.
I'm a long time virtualbox user but had never played with headless vms and never realized how easy that is with vagrant. Additionally, using vagrant to get a coreos vm running, with docker all set up, was pretty cool. So far I'm finding the payload of the vms rather heavy (with the os overhead), but I haven't really got down to setting up individual docker app containers. I'm looking forward to that, and even more to what could lie ahead for this space: vagrant, coreos, docker, chef/puppet all look to making a very promising convergence.
ps: especially on committing and layering.
http://blogs.atlassian.com/2013/06/deploy-java-apps-with-doc...
There is hype around docker, for sure. The optimist in me likes to think that it's because people find the project useful and are excited about the possibilities of containers in general - which I believe are huge.
Me and the dotCloud team have been working on container technology since 2008. For a long time it felt like preaching in the desert - mostly because it required exotic patches to the kernel which made widespread adoption difficult. So it's very rewarding to see more people adopt containers, and of course it's great to be on the right side of the hype for a change. But if we hadn't been at the right place at the right time, someone else would have done it instead. Containers are just too important and useful to not blow up.
I'd also love to hear what people think about the relationship between freebsd+jails, solaris+zones and Linux+LXC/docker and/or if it would make sense to modularize the back-end so that "docker" (as in the daemon/management tools) would work for maintaining jails and/or zones as well?
It'd be fun to be able to run docker+LXC under GNU Debian/Linux, and docker+jails under GNU Debian/kFreebsd (and ditto for the Debian-like/Ubunut-based solaris distros)... Maybe not useful, but interesting...
