Docker Registry experiencing full service disruption

[stingraycharles]

http://status.docker.com/

[contingencies]

... and again we see that decentralization or elimination of single points of failure (SPOF) is critical in the design of all manner of systems.

What's stopping open source infrastructure supporting magnet URLs? :)

[JonnieCache → contingencies]

>What's stopping open source infrastructure supporting magnet URLs? :)

This actually sounds like a good idea. Is it a good idea? I suppose many distributed systems use hash rings and the like already, but I don't remember ever seeing them exposed to users as urls like bittorrent does.

[stingraycharles → contingencies]

I think in this case it should be even easier. The whole docker registry is just a REST HTTP server that supports CRUD operations (PUT, GET, etc).

I wonder what the reason for the outage is. I am pretty sure the Docker team is qualified enough to prevent failures caused by a SPOF.

[shykes → stingraycharles]

Hi everyone, sorry about the outage (which appears to be now fixed). I don't know what caused it but I'm sure the Hub team will post a post-mortem soon.

My educated guess is that it has something to do with our recent move off of Dotcloud as part as the sale to Cloud Control [1]. In my experience, migrations always introduce unexpected moving parts which can lead to service disruption in spite of thorough preparation.

Note on the registry being "just a crud server". That's true, I suppose. But at very large scale everything gets harder to do reliably.

About decentralization: there is a major development thread underway to make images self-describing. Once that is implemented, the naming of images will be decorrelated from their method of delivery, there is already talk of a bittorrent and ipfs plugin :)

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/04/docker-sells-dotcloud-to-cl...

[thu → shykes]

Solomon, where can we read more about the decentralization plans ?

[yaksha → thu]

Google search results in this:

https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/6805

[wilhil]

Sorry to sound dumb here, but, I haven't used docker yet... thought it is something you install locally?

What does Docker to centrally that requires a third party service?

[dkhar → wilhil]

It's the registry, not Docker itself.

This analogy might help: Docker Registry is to Docker as Github is to Git.

[wilhil → dkhar]

Makes perfect sense!

Thanks

[stingraycharles]

... and it's back. Hope they will post a post-mortem.