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by wmf 4361 days ago
If KVM didn't eat their lunch already, why would Docker be different?
4 comments

Marketing, maturity, support and tooling?

I think the only ones that really ran with KVM were/are Joyent with their Smart OS - combining (some of the) tooling/tech that makes Solaris Zones great with a Free and Open operating system, freedom from Sun/Oracle and support for many guest platforms (and/or low overhead "native" zones).

I think the only real downside of Smart OS is the same as with Open Solaris (or pretty much any other "it isn't Linux"-unix-like OS'): drivers and hw support.

The great thing with Linux as a host, is that (edge cases excepted) you can literally run in on your entire infrastructure (right now, or in the near probable future) -- from phones and tablets via desktops and laptops through servers, clusters and pretty much anything beyond.

I'm sure we'll see some backlashes from the new monoculture, but I think overall it's a bright future.

And we can have our occasional parties arguing for why everyone should really use (Dragonfly|Free|Open)BSD/(Open)Solaris/Plan9 because it has X, does Y better and has more consistent and better documentation.

Because it's a new paradigm, not just a competing virtual-machine implementation.
It's not a paradigm which even remotely threatens VMware's use case, though.
They're not the same thing, and there's currently no lunch eating going on.

KVM is a full hypervisor. It can run Linux, Windows, OSX, Solaris, etc.

Docker on Linux can run Linux. It can do it with less overhead and higher performance than KVM.

lxc is lighter weight. just like 5% page size saves millions in bandwidth. 5% cpu overhead saves in electricity and hardware costs. Assuming all other things being equal (I know they aren't - but security, tooling, and management can be improved) vmware has inherent overhead of the hypervisor that's not an issue with lxc.