[philips]

All of us want containers to be successful, they solve a ton of problems. But, part of that success is getting the format and the security correct. And we want to have that technical discussion and settle on those best practices for all implementations.

There are things in the App Container spec that we would like to see in Docker, this is why we put in the work to make a spec, write the code to make it work and start a technical discussion. This has been the goal since the beginning. The problems that exist in the current Docker Engine that we would like to address are technical and real:

1) We believe in having a decentralized and user controlled signing mechanism. In the appc specification and rocket we use the DNS federated namespace. See the `rkt trust` subcommand and the signing section of the ACI spec.

2) We believe that image IDs should be backed by a cryptographic identity. It should be possible for a user to say: "run container `sha512-abed`" and have the result be identical on every machine because it is backed by a cryptographic hash.

In rocket another thing we wanted to do was enable running the download/import steps outside of being a root user. For example today you can download and import an image from disk in the native ACI format with rkt. And in the next release `rkt fetch` will be runnable as a user in the same unix group as `/var/lib/rkt/`.

[ABS]

I agree with everything you say from a technical point of view, it just doesn't change the political/business/marketing consideration IMHO

[rdtsc]

> All of us want containers to be successful, they solve a ton of problems.

Not sure I want containers to be successful (unless of course the main business is building and marketing containers). I want my problem solved but whether they are solved with containers, mocks, jails, VMs, and so on doesn't matter as much.

[dmourati]

"they solve a ton of problems"

Name two?

[m_mueller]

Deploying to a cleanly defined fresh state without paying any performance penalty. Documenting your dependencies by writing the deployment script (=Dockerfile) and not having to reinvent the wheel everytime (image inheritance). Sandboxing linux applications without paying any performance penalty. Creating a PaaS where your services internally always see the same standard port, externally they're linked together through docker, thus separating the routing concerns from your application logic.

[dmourati]

These are all great but I get the most of the same benefits from VMs and many more:

fresh state/ no performance penalty (AMI+autoscaling) Document dependencies, not reinvent (Packer file) Sandboxing (same) Always use same standard port (easier with VMs as 1:1 map)

I know most people think that containers/docker/whatever new stack does these things better and they may be right. The benefits however don't outweigh the costs in weaker toolset and less mature stack.

For my use cases, the biggest problem is that containers don't solve the "where does this run" question. Whenever I ask this, people loudly exclaim "anywhere!" which is the same as "I don't know" to me.

AWS AMIs run in 11 regions x N AZs around the world. This solves a much bigger technical problem for me than "it's lighter weight and easier to do incremental releases on top of" which seem to be the only things in favor of containers.

Many people, including Amazon, say "run containers on VMs!" This seems unnecessarily complex for little additional gain.

I'm really curious if the containerization folks are using Packer and if not why not.

[eropple]

I run containers in Amazon. Not using their service, because their service is silly, but on Mesos.

I am not locked into a 1:1 tenancy between applications and instances (though I could have it if I wanted). Multitenancy is trivial. I have the ability to spin up new instances of my applications to combat spike loads or instance failures in single-digit seconds rather than in minutes. My developers can run every container within a single boot2docker VM instead of incurring the overhead of running six virtual machines. It's easier to integration-test because my test harness doesn't have to fight with Amazon, but can rather use a portable, cross-service system in Mesos. In addition, I don't have to autoscale with the crude primitive of an instance in production. Multitenancy means that I can scale individual applications within the cluster to its headroom, and only when the entire cluster nears capacity must I autoscale. I can better leverage economies of scale, while allowing me to leverage more vCPU power to applications that need it (running two dozen applications on a c3.8xlarge is very unlikely to bring to bear at any given time less computational performance to a given application than running each application on its own m3.medium).

I could do this without containers and with only Mesos. It would be worse, but I could do it. I could not do this at all with baked AMIs and instances without spending more money, doing more work, and being frustrated by my environment. I know this I've built the same system you describe (I preferred vagrant-aws because when something broke it was easier to debug, but we moved to Packer before I left) and I would never go back to it. It was more fragile and harder to componentize than a containerized architecture with a smart resource allocation layer. The running context of a container should be "anywhere", and it should be "I don't know", and you caring about that is a defect in your mental model.

[dmourati]

Thanks for the reply.

[m_mueller]

The one thing I don't believe you, is that you don't have a performance penalty. If you compare a bare metal machine running VMs with a bare metal machine running containers, there will always be a performance penalty for the VMs - they are more heavyweight by definition by running an additional kernel for each VM. Even assuming CPU doesn't get a hit at all, it still incurs memory and diskspace penalties. As an effect, from an IaaS POV, a container can be made available cheaper than a VM, and you can think much less about using them from a performance point of view - does it make sense logically or from a security standpoint? -> use it.

[iso8859-1]

Why do you mention like Linux? Containers shouldn't be specific to Linux.

[m_mueller]

Well.. in Docker's case they are? It's based on lxc, a Linux kernel technology. Of course BSD had it before that, although with a different name.

[vezzy-fnord]

Docker hasn't been based on LXC since 0.9 by now. It uses its own libcontainer.

[m_mueller]

Which to my knowledge ist still linux-only, so while it's good to be technically correct, it doesn't change my point.