Great post. I completely agree, and was making this same argument to someone yesterday. There are a few important trends and facts:
- Containerization allows more tenants-per-server than virtualization
- The entire business model of cloud computing is maximizing tenants-per-server
- Because containerization has a direct cost benefit to cloud providers, they will adopt it quickly
- Quick adoption of containerization will trigger a "new wave" similar to when Linux gained mass adoption
- Cloud companies are scrambling to invest in hot containerization rather than build their own
- Docker has developer street cred and a solid team
- Post-dotcom, post-web2.0, companies invest in open source software now. This is new.
- Cloud companies compete with each other
- Different cloud companies invested in Docker, CoreOS
- Docker, CoreOS are competing
My logic is a bit fragmented, but all the necessary facts are there, and the conclusion that logically follows from them is that it makes rational business sense for CoreOS to diverge from Docker. There's billions of dollars at stake in the latest "platform war" (previous wars include desktop, server, mobile) -- the battle for the cloud. Containerization directly reduces costs and the "metric that matters" for cloud hosts, tenants-per-server. Therefore any open source company with a good containerization solution is going to attract a lot of investment. But bigcorp A does not want to rely on strategic direction of bigcorp B. Therefore they diverge their open source offerings.
It makes sense from a business perspective, and it's kind of sad from an open source perspective, but also good if you believe in free market economics. The question is, how much do free market economics apply in open source?
Containerization directly reduces costs and the "metric that matters" for cloud hosts, tenants-per-server.
the flip side of this coin is that it reduces the cost for every cloud provider. In essence containers moves the locus of competition further up the stack, commoditising the layers below. I'll bet there were a lot of people who were upset when shipping containers were standardised too.
>The question is, how much do free market economics apply in open source?
This is something I ask myself a lot (as someone focused 100% on open source at a company whose core business is not open source support).
For all the hype that open source has enjoyed as a business model, it is much smaller/untested/too early to tell compared to the proprietary model. The most financially successful open source company to date is Red Hat, which, at 10B USD+, is a great success by anyone's measure. But that's the best any open source pure play company has done. If you look in the other direction, Oracle is worth 180B USD, and even a fledgling BI company like Tableau is in the high single digit billion.
As much as I'd like open source companies to be an Oracle-grade blockbuster success, the brief story is not exactly promising.
This analysis is spot on. There is nothing wrong with what Docker or CoreOS are doing. As the OP pointed out, stuff like this happens all the time in computing.
What makes it awkward is that you can't say this stuff and hope to convince the critically important group of people for open source software/companies: user communities.
Users care a lot about their software and community around it growing and improving, but they won't be convinced by the needs of venture-backed, growth-oriented corporate strategy. (I am not saying this is good or bad but stating the fact).
I appreciate the author's insights of taking previous examples of technology shifts, extracting a generic pattern from them, and then applying it to the new Docker direction.
But I don't fully buy into it.
To me, the new emphasis on "orchestrating & managing" containers is an obvious and unavoidable progression of taming new layers of complexity as they appear. The lower level technology of containers solved one set of complexities (app deploy onto 1 operating system), but they also create new complexities: tame the explosion of a thousand containers in the data center.
How is this different from MS System Center, HP OpenView, and IBM Tivoli as managers/watchdogs of Windows & Linux boxes or KVM-over-ip to remotely reboot/powercycle racks of servers? Yes, those "enterprisey management console" products are "value added" and successful. Yes, there was competition between OpenView & Tivoli and competition between KVM vendors. But they weren't the kind of products that captured mindshare as glamorous; it was just something the IT department picked to "keep the lights running". Those management products also did not mint billionaires (millionaires yes, but not billionaires.) So the recent analysis from blogs that pits Docker vs CoreOs as a "strategic-winner-take-all" platform war like Internet Explorer vs Netscape doesn't feel quite accurate.
It seems like the more interesting software fight is datacenter cloud o/s which is even higher level than Docker's orchestration-of-containers focus. Example of this would be OpenStack[1]. Proprietary ones would be Facebook internal cloud stack and Amazon AWS. This "datacenter-as-a-platform" would subsume the container standards fight.
There may be something I'm missing in the Docker vs CoreOS that makes me discount this competition while others are playing it up. For example, is there some plugin architecture that would lock in developer mindshare?
The interesting fight is actually the next level up from OpenStack (or AWS, or vSphere). It's in the PaaS space: Cloud Foundry and OpenShift are sprinting to be the full-service cloud an enterprise can run in a private datacentre.
I have a dog in this fight -- I work on Cloud Foundry. Naturally I think CF's tech is better, especially our next generation of controller/staging/execution/health management (Diego).
It seems like the more interesting software fight is datacenter cloud o/s which is even higher level than Docker's orchestration-of-containers focus.
I hadn't thought about it, but this makes a lot of sense as the next place of competition where value can be added. It's also where CoreOS is trying to be. It would also suggest that the level above that is abstracting datacenter's away to just manage a single global system made up of multiple DC's.
There may be something I'm missing in the Docker vs CoreOS that makes me discount this competition while others are playing it up.
Docker and CoreOS aren't strictly competing with each other, CoreOS wanted to use Docker as a commodity component (as it was designed), Docker eventually realised that becoming a commodity businesses wasn't going to be very profitable and moved into CoreOS' territory.
When working with FreeBSD jails a decade ago, I always thought they were enough to build my servers and needed just more polishing. Then hypervisors caught on and it was the virtualization era.
Now soft-virtualization is coming back and it's becoming popular to say "hypervisors are overhead".
It's funny how we could have taken a different direction ten years ago but I think I understand. We needed to go through the "VMs will run any of your existing software, don't worry". With mass adoption, new software can start to be written to run inside soft-virtualization (with not that many modifications, if any).
Originally Docker was going to be a container and CoreOS was a platform to run containers. They were both pieces in a traditional software stack.
Docker had a round of funding and the investors pushed Docker in a different direction: App store. Docker was no longer just a piece in the stack and CoreOS could see the writing on the wall: libOS. Docker would marginalize CoreOS the same way LXC was marginalized.
CoreOS is going on the offensive because they were tipped off on Docker's hand.
So which platform can one use to deploy docker cloud? We already have a set of CoreOS servers running docker containers... with rocket replacing docker and automagic updates in coreOS this seems kinda dangerous.
[+] [-] chatmasta|11 years ago|reply
- Containerization allows more tenants-per-server than virtualization
- The entire business model of cloud computing is maximizing tenants-per-server
- Because containerization has a direct cost benefit to cloud providers, they will adopt it quickly
- Quick adoption of containerization will trigger a "new wave" similar to when Linux gained mass adoption
- Cloud companies are scrambling to invest in hot containerization rather than build their own
- Docker has developer street cred and a solid team
- Post-dotcom, post-web2.0, companies invest in open source software now. This is new.
- Cloud companies compete with each other
- Different cloud companies invested in Docker, CoreOS
- Docker, CoreOS are competing
My logic is a bit fragmented, but all the necessary facts are there, and the conclusion that logically follows from them is that it makes rational business sense for CoreOS to diverge from Docker. There's billions of dollars at stake in the latest "platform war" (previous wars include desktop, server, mobile) -- the battle for the cloud. Containerization directly reduces costs and the "metric that matters" for cloud hosts, tenants-per-server. Therefore any open source company with a good containerization solution is going to attract a lot of investment. But bigcorp A does not want to rely on strategic direction of bigcorp B. Therefore they diverge their open source offerings.
It makes sense from a business perspective, and it's kind of sad from an open source perspective, but also good if you believe in free market economics. The question is, how much do free market economics apply in open source?
[+] [-] dantiberian|11 years ago|reply
the flip side of this coin is that it reduces the cost for every cloud provider. In essence containers moves the locus of competition further up the stack, commoditising the layers below. I'll bet there were a lot of people who were upset when shipping containers were standardised too.
[+] [-] kiyoto|11 years ago|reply
This is something I ask myself a lot (as someone focused 100% on open source at a company whose core business is not open source support).
For all the hype that open source has enjoyed as a business model, it is much smaller/untested/too early to tell compared to the proprietary model. The most financially successful open source company to date is Red Hat, which, at 10B USD+, is a great success by anyone's measure. But that's the best any open source pure play company has done. If you look in the other direction, Oracle is worth 180B USD, and even a fledgling BI company like Tableau is in the high single digit billion.
As much as I'd like open source companies to be an Oracle-grade blockbuster success, the brief story is not exactly promising.
[+] [-] beachstartup|11 years ago|reply
this is not exactly true. the business model is to maximize the revenue per server, not the number of tenants. this can be done in a number of ways.
[+] [-] kiyoto|11 years ago|reply
What makes it awkward is that you can't say this stuff and hope to convince the critically important group of people for open source software/companies: user communities.
Users care a lot about their software and community around it growing and improving, but they won't be convinced by the needs of venture-backed, growth-oriented corporate strategy. (I am not saying this is good or bad but stating the fact).
[+] [-] jasode|11 years ago|reply
But I don't fully buy into it.
To me, the new emphasis on "orchestrating & managing" containers is an obvious and unavoidable progression of taming new layers of complexity as they appear. The lower level technology of containers solved one set of complexities (app deploy onto 1 operating system), but they also create new complexities: tame the explosion of a thousand containers in the data center.
How is this different from MS System Center, HP OpenView, and IBM Tivoli as managers/watchdogs of Windows & Linux boxes or KVM-over-ip to remotely reboot/powercycle racks of servers? Yes, those "enterprisey management console" products are "value added" and successful. Yes, there was competition between OpenView & Tivoli and competition between KVM vendors. But they weren't the kind of products that captured mindshare as glamorous; it was just something the IT department picked to "keep the lights running". Those management products also did not mint billionaires (millionaires yes, but not billionaires.) So the recent analysis from blogs that pits Docker vs CoreOs as a "strategic-winner-take-all" platform war like Internet Explorer vs Netscape doesn't feel quite accurate.
It seems like the more interesting software fight is datacenter cloud o/s which is even higher level than Docker's orchestration-of-containers focus. Example of this would be OpenStack[1]. Proprietary ones would be Facebook internal cloud stack and Amazon AWS. This "datacenter-as-a-platform" would subsume the container standards fight.
There may be something I'm missing in the Docker vs CoreOS that makes me discount this competition while others are playing it up. For example, is there some plugin architecture that would lock in developer mindshare?
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack
[+] [-] jacques_chester|11 years ago|reply
I have a dog in this fight -- I work on Cloud Foundry. Naturally I think CF's tech is better, especially our next generation of controller/staging/execution/health management (Diego).
[+] [-] dantiberian|11 years ago|reply
I hadn't thought about it, but this makes a lot of sense as the next place of competition where value can be added. It's also where CoreOS is trying to be. It would also suggest that the level above that is abstracting datacenter's away to just manage a single global system made up of multiple DC's.
There may be something I'm missing in the Docker vs CoreOS that makes me discount this competition while others are playing it up.
Docker and CoreOS aren't strictly competing with each other, CoreOS wanted to use Docker as a commodity component (as it was designed), Docker eventually realised that becoming a commodity businesses wasn't going to be very profitable and moved into CoreOS' territory.
[+] [-] gtirloni|11 years ago|reply
Now soft-virtualization is coming back and it's becoming popular to say "hypervisors are overhead".
It's funny how we could have taken a different direction ten years ago but I think I understand. We needed to go through the "VMs will run any of your existing software, don't worry". With mass adoption, new software can start to be written to run inside soft-virtualization (with not that many modifications, if any).
If only.. oh well.
[+] [-] ErikHuisman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dantiberian|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Karunamon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dantiberian|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CoconutPilot|11 years ago|reply
Originally Docker was going to be a container and CoreOS was a platform to run containers. They were both pieces in a traditional software stack.
Docker had a round of funding and the investors pushed Docker in a different direction: App store. Docker was no longer just a piece in the stack and CoreOS could see the writing on the wall: libOS. Docker would marginalize CoreOS the same way LXC was marginalized.
CoreOS is going on the offensive because they were tipped off on Docker's hand.
Occam's Razor.
[+] [-] perlpimp|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] serve_yay|11 years ago|reply