Docker loads up $15m to push containerization into bit barns Containerization expert Docker has slurped $15m in filthy valley lucre to help it push its tech further into data centers under the leadership of a new, experienced chief executive. The funding will give the company the money needed to grow its engineering team while also ploughing more money into sales and support, says new …
Red uses similar(perhaps the same tech I recognize some of it from their presentations) tech in their PaaS product which I think is called Openshift.
Sounds interesting but I really don't see it going anywhere outside of highly specialized shops that really can't bare any overhead at all that virtualization requires(that % is going down as time goes on and CPUs get better). Perhaps if this was out 12-14 years ago (VMware GSX days) things would be different.
Nate, you make a good point regarding the overhead that virtualization takes, which is decreasing.
For HPC, I beleive that Docker will have a big future - packaging up containers to run a specific application, with its associated libraries and running them on VMs.
Also HPC workloads perform when you have CPU pinning - ie processes run on an allocated core and aren;t moved around by the OS (you want all those caches fileld nicely, and not having to repopulate them). I already run cpusets on an HPC ssytem I manage, and see cgroups as an extension.
I agree that the overhead argument is probably not going to sway the majority of places to switch from virtualization to containers...
Most folks seem to be using virtualization to work around packaging and deployment problems by packaging up the entire OS & application stack. With containers the fact that you have just one resource management system (ie: the OS) will make operating those boxes a lot simpler, and I think that the learning curve of OS + Containers + Docker will be a lot shallower than learning curve for VM+OS (I am thinking of server style workloads here rather than using a VM to run an old desktop app).
Whilst I would tend to agree that general trends would seem to limit the market for this product, we shouldn't overlook the burgeoning low end (ie. ARM) servers and 'handheld' devices (thinking of the various Ubuntu demonstrations of converged Linux/Android smartphone/portable desktop devices).
The great thing about Docker isn't the virtualisation and low overhead, it's the ease with which you can make deployments of applications. You configure your Docker from a base image, effectively recording a diff. Then all you really need to deploy is that diff from the base, the run file. And you know it's all self contained and a fresh environment with nothing screwed up during build/deployment.
Been playing around with it a bit at work and it's got some serious advantages.
There's nothing particularly cutting edge about this. OpenVZ has been around for a decade, as has the upstream commercial version, Virtuozzo. Linux containers (LXC) is part of the kernel and Solaris has had containers for a long time.
OpenVZ in particular is very mature, with snapshoting and application templating built in. More importantly, most of these established alternatives are free..
Yeah, not sure how much money you can make inventing something that several other vendors already have included at no additional cost in their base OS.
Both Unix (Solaris) and Linux (Red Hat) already have this functionality in an enterprise ready and highly ISV-supported and mature Operating System. Even AIX has the WPar which is not all that different from a conceptual standpoint.
This idea is a very efficient way to share resources, and in many ways can be used for virtualization and compartmentalization without the heavy weight of a VM/OS image, etc for each application container and they can be replicated easily for very fast provisioning and migration. Its just not anything new.
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