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Docker ascendancy's ignites a flak-in-the-box cloud arms race

Web lessons in bullet-proofing the container class

System of a d

Rocket uses systemd. Docker uses a daemon to spawn a child process that becomes the PID 1 of the container (which would normally be systemd). In the end, Docker looks no more "fundamentally flawed" than Rocket, it just lacks systemd integration at the moment.

Given the popularity of CoreOS among developer's using Docker - it really is one of the nicest ways to run Docker - Rocket's tighter, possibly more secure integration with CoreOS just might win some over from the Docker fold.

That leaves the container space in a situation somewhat akin to what happened when Google’s Chrome browser appeared and stole much of the developer mindshare owned by Firefox. As the Firefox of 2008 was to web developers, so Docker has been very much the darling of devops. And yet, just as Chrome made speed and web standards top priority – something Firefox developers clearly wanted to do, but couldn't always do – Rocket offers some real advantage over Docker. It's more modular, less dependent on a single core and, arguably, more in line with the popular Unix philosophy of small parts loosely joined.

In the end, though, the competition between the two will result in the same thing that happened with Firefox and Chrome: the whole ecosystem benefitted. In the case of the browsers, the web became faster and better for everyone. When it comes to containerisation, the data centre will likely become more user-friendly and development become a little bit easier.

At this point, perfection would be a lot to ask of a service as new as Docker, which only hit 1.0 in June 2014, or Rocket, which is not even a year old. Neither is perfect, but already both are giving developers and devops much simpler ways to deploy, which is part of why the biggest cloud hosts in the world – Google, Amazon and Microsoft to name a few – are lining up to make sure their clouds work with Docker. This in turn means that Rocket and other competitors are also poised to take the data centre by storm.

One of the most interesting tangential effects of containerisation is that, from a developer perspective, it means that all cloud environments are effectively equal. There's no competition in terms of functionality, and no developer lock-in. Unhappy with your current host? Just deploy your container to another one, switch over DNS and you're done. This means that cloud hosts are no longer competing strictly on the features of their underlying systems, but with the extras they can offer. The full effect of this transition hasn't really been felt yet, but already Google and others are ramping up their "extras".

Google released an open-source Docker management app, Kubernetes (the Greek word for a ship's helmsman), that Mountain View claims will let you turn your cluster of container-filled virtual machines into a virtual Google data centre.

What's perhaps most interesting about Docker and its competitors is that in every case, from Canonical to Google, there's a very clear message: the future of deployment is in containers. The future of development and deployment, and especially the so-called cloud hosting market, will be containers.

Containers won't solve every problem and won't be right for every deployment, but for the 80 percent use case – perhaps more – containerisation will trump a dedicated virtual machine. ®

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