
Why Docker and CoreOS’ split was predictable - dantiberian
http://danielcompton.net/2014/12/02/modular-integrated-docker-coreos
======
chatmasta
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?

~~~
kiyoto
>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.

~~~
skriticos2
I guess it's a question of what the company is selling. Google for example
uses huge stacks of open source to run their business. And even though they
are far from being pure open source, they do contribute back to the community
in multiple ways, for example with contributions to the Linux kernel and open
source projects like Chromium and Go. And then there are projects like Qt,
that mix open source tools with enterprise support.

But I think that the field of IT is still extremely young and that in the
future larger companies will discover that collaborating on open source
platform and infrastructure projects will give them much better synergy
effects and lower IT costs by removing the license cost and at the same time
lowering the support cost. Compared to history, the 20-30 years that
mainstream computing has is really just a spark and there is so much change
coming that will be directed by market and competition.

~~~
kiyoto
re: your Google example, that's why I said open source "pure play". Of course,
we wouldn't be where we are without all open source projects that sprang up in
the last few decades.

And yea, it's too soon to tell. Software & software business are evolving
rapidly under our feet. I am curious to see what will happen next.

------
kiyoto
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).

------
jasode
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?

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack)

~~~
dantiberian
_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.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _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._

I work on Cloud Foundry. We already have this tool, at least for the IaaS
layer. It's called BOSH[1], and it allows no-downtime deploys and updates of
very large PaaSes (such as our own Pivotal Web Services).

In our reference Cloud Foundry configuration, cf-release[2], we define a
deployment manifest that can install a Cloud Foundry instance that spans two
AWS availability zones.

We dogfood this system every week. Sometimes twice per week. Our entire
Pivotal Web Services system is updated, live, online. And basically, it's very
rare that anyone notices. Which is awesome.

[1]
[https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh](https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh)

[2] [https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-
release](https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-release)

------
gtirloni
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).

If only.. oh well.

------
ErikHuisman
Click here if you get an 404: [http://danielcompton.net/2014/12/02/modular-
integrated-docke...](http://danielcompton.net/2014/12/02/modular-integrated-
docker-coreos%20\(daniel%20compton's%20conflicted%20copy%202014-12-03\))

~~~
dantiberian
Back up now. Sorry about that.

------
Karunamon
Author changed the post title I think, the link is now dead.
[http://danielcompton.net](http://danielcompton.net) still shows the article
in first position on his blog.

~~~
dantiberian
Some post management didn't go quite right, thanks for the tip, it's back up
now.

------
CoconutPilot
I have a different theory.

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
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.

------
serve_yay
Great analysis, thank you.

