Google Embraces Docker, the Next Big Thing in Cloud Computing

Google has plenty of experience with containers already, since they heavily use cgroups and the concept of containers in their production environment for isolation and resource control, never mind the fact that two of their engineers had written much of the initial cgroups code. I talked about this in my &quot;Introduction to Containers on Linux using LXC&quot; screencast [1]. Briefly, Google is in the process of open sourcing their internal container code [2], there was a Wired article that talked about their container orchestration system [3], and finally, there was John Wilkes (Google Cluster Management), who talks about the container management system [4].<p>Docker adds very interesting filesystem ideas and software for the management of container images. Personally, I think we are on the cusp of a transition from VPS (xen&#x2F;hvm) to VPS (containers). I also hope that Google throws some of their concepts at the Docker project. Interesting times for this space.<p>[1] <a href="http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/24-introduction-to-containers-on-linux-using-lxc" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sysadmincasts.com&#x2F;episodes&#x2F;24-introduction-to-contain...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/google/lmctfy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;lmctfy</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.wired.com/2013/03/google-borg-twitter-mesos/all/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;03&#x2F;google-borg-twitter-mesos&#x2F;all&#x2F;</a><p>[4] <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZFMlO98Jkc" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=0ZFMlO98Jkc</a>

For at least the last 15 years I have almost always done &#x27;devops&#x27; myself (before it was called that). Managing deployment goes with designing and building systems.<p>My problem is that I am sort of stuck in the past. Whether I am using VPSs, AWS, or rented physical servers, I have only a partially automated way to set up servers. This scales to small numbers of servers just fine, and that is mostly the world I live in, but I need to improve my workflow. This really hit home yesterday when I had to upgrade a Haskell GHC&#x2F;platform because I tweaked a Haskell app making incompatible with an old GHC 7.4.* setup on an older server, and ended up wasting some time before fixing things.<p>Working as a contractor at Google last year was an eye opener. I really loved their infrastructure. Eye opening experience.<p>Docker seems like my best path forward.

Is Docker one of those things that works better for big projects than small ones? I tried using it for 3 little projects, just to see what all the fuss was about. But every time it ended up being easier to use bare LXC.

I have few questions about docker<p>1. When I need to move application between different systems running Ubuntu, Debian etc, now I use Virtual box. Can I use Docker now on?<p>2. A quick reading about docker tells me that instead of running a guest OS as in Virtual box docker only holds application related things. Then how could it handle deployment between Debian Squeeze and Ubuntu 14.04. I mean old and new Linux version<p>3. Compared to virtual box how easy it is to install and use Docker<p>4. Can you please tell some places where you people use docker<p>5. How many of you have migrated to Docker from virtual box and related things?<p>Disclaimer: Noob detected :)

Does the complexity of using containers bother anybody? It just seems like this adds so many more attack points by removing the virtual machine which was a good way to organize services.

Increasing parallelization has been done in evolutionary steps for the last 10 years. This is a great step, but I&#x27;m sure your amazons and rackspaces of the world will soon be building docker++ (and docker really is just ec2&#x2F;AMI++)