alt Hacker NewsA full decade since we took the 'it works on my machine' excuse and turned it into the industry standard architecture ('then we'll just ship your machine to production').
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I see this take a lot but I'd argue what Docker did was to entice everyone to capture their build into a repeatable process (via a Dockerfile).
"Ship your machine to production" isn't so bad when you have a ten-line script to recreate the machine at the push of a button.
It's the ultimate in static linking. Perhaps a question that should be asked is why that approach is so compelling?
the real trick was making "ship your machine" sound like best practice and ten years later we r doing the same thing with ai "it works in my notebook" jst became "containerize the notebook and call it a pipeline" the abstraction always wins because fixing the actual problem is just too hard.
In 2002 I used to think why cant they package a website. These .doc installation instructions are insane! What a waste of someones time.
I sort of had the problem in mind. Docker is the answer. Not clever enough to have inventer it.
If I did I would probably have invented octopus deploy as I was a Microsoft/.NET guy.
>'then we'll just ship your machine production'
Minus the kernel of course. What is one to do for workloads requiring special kernel features or modules?
Oh, thank you... I'm not alone... I'm so tired of seeing crappy containers with pseudo service management handled by Dockerfiles, used instead of proper and serious packaging like that of many venerable Linux distributions.
Linux user space is an abject disaster of a design. So so so bad. Docker should not need to exist. Running computer programs need not be so difficult.
(coauthor of the article here)
Well, before Docker I used to work on Xen and that possible future of massive block devices assembled using Vagrant and Packer has thankfully been avoided...
One thing that's hard to capture in the article -- but that permeated the early Dockercons -- is the (positive) disruption Docker had in how IT shops were run. Before that going to production was a giant effort, and 'shipping your filesystem' quickly was such a change in how people approached their work. We had so many people come up to us grateful that they could suddenly build services more quickly and get them into the hands of users without having to seek permission slips signed in triplicate.
We're seeing the another seismic cultural shift now with coding agents, but I think Docker had a similar impact back then, and it was a really fun community spirit. Less so today with the giant hyperscalars all dominating, sadly, but I'll keep my fond memories :-)