[ilyt]

If anything this is testament to the failure of previous solutions to popularize it.

Docker invented absolutely zero on the OS side and reused what LXC did but the invention here is not "putting things in containers" but "making it easy to put things in containers" and "making it easy to run those containers. Every solution before that required a bunch more knowledge.

> Running Docker on non-Linux platforms requires a Linux VM to run in the background. It's not as cross platform as people make out.

Which people ? I never seen anyone saying Docker makes it easy to run cross platform stuff, and it was always one of it's pain points.

[laumars]

> If anything this is testament to the failure of previous solutions to popularize it.

Maybe. But I'd rather not argue about popularity in a conversation about technical merit. The two aren't mutually inclusive and popularity is a subjective quality. Nothing good ever comes from conversations about popularity and preference.

> Every solution before that required a bunch more knowledge.

I'm not sure I fully agree with that. Docker has a lot of bespoke knowledge whereas the previous solutions built on top of existing knowledge. Where they differed was that Docker was an easier learning curve for people with previously zero existing systems knowledge. Which is something I didn't really appreciate until reading these responses because (possibly because I'm an old timer developer. I want to understand how my code works at a systems level so made it my job to understand the OS and even hardware too - though that's gotten harder as tech has progressed. But that was expected of developers when I started out).

> Which people ? I never seen anyone saying Docker makes it easy to run cross platform stuff, and it was always one of it's pain points.

The comment I replied to said: "get someone on Windows or Mac transparently install the image and run it with a few cmdlines"

[ilyt]

>> If anything this is testament to the failure of previous solutions to popularize it.

>Maybe. But I'd rather not argue about popularity in a conversation about technical merit. The two aren't mutually inclusive and popularity is a subjective quality. Nothing good ever comes from conversations about popularity and preference.

The popularity is directly related to technical merit of it being very easy to start, both to run and to create containers. It isn't "just" popular, it got popular because it was solution to the problem that near-zero infrastructure skill developer could apply. We have countless example of solutions winning almost purely on having low barrier to entry, and docker was just that for containers.

The previous solutions ignored that, and assumed the target audience is mildly competent sysadmin, not a developer that has no idea what UID is, let alone the rest of ops stuff.

And it got buy in on the other side of the fence too, as now sysadmin instead of installing a spider's net of PHP or Ruby deps just had to install docker and deploy a container.

>> Every solution before that required a bunch more knowledge.

> I'm not sure I fully agree with that. Docker has a lot of bespoke knowledge whereas the previous solutions built on top of existing knowledge. Where they differed was that Docker was an easier learning curve for people with previously zero existing systems knowledge.

Well, you got the point. At the point where you need that knowledge (and I'd argue debugging docker container is in every way harder than just having a process in system) you already bought into the ecosystem. There is no initial hurdle to go thru like there was with previous systems trying to do same thing, even if you end up with harder to debug end result.

Just like with other things, PHP got popular because it was easier than anything CGI related, "just write code inside your HTML", Ruby got popular off Rails and 15 minute blog engine demo, Python being just all around easy to learn.

[laumars]

> The previous solutions ignored that, and assumed the target audience is mildly competent sysadmin, not a developer that has no idea what UID is, let alone the rest of ops stuff.

But that doesn't mean that the previous solutions weren't popular for others outside of the developer community. The comments here are heavily developer orientated but that's only part of the story in terms of the wider container ecosystem.

> Just like with other things, PHP got popular because it was easier than anything CGI related, "just write code inside your HTML", Ruby got popular off Rails and 15 minute blog engine demo, Python being just all around easy to learn.

The point I was making wasn't that "Docker doesn't deserve popularity" nor any confusion as to why it's popular. It was saying that the stuff that came before it was also easy.

Your example about languages here is a apt because PHP is an easier language for people from a zero coding background. But if your background is in C then PHP is going to be much harder to use compared to learning Nim, Zig or Rust.

Saying the containerisation solutions that came before were garbage, as people have done, isn't accurate. I'm not being critical of Docker; I'm defending the elegance of Jails. It's just that elegance is exposed in a different way and for a different audience to who Docker targets.

[nunez]

i think a lot of previous solutions focused on the "5x" engineer that was willing to comb through manpages and dig through the source (or at least the Makefile) if something unexpected happened.

many, many, MANY engineers are not like that.

many just want to build and push their features, and that's fine.

Docker knew that LXC was onto something and focused on the latter audience; that combined with their VC funding after they hit a critical mass is why they are heralded as having "invented" containers (even though they didn't).