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Ex VMware, Microsoft and Citrix workers set up application container company

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Re: Ex VMware, Microsoft and Citrix workers set up application container company

#41

> Container hype is running high. Developers have flocked to the technology for more easily packaging applications and running them across various disparate environments. It's a hype that should die in a fire bigger than the one reserved for Adobe Flash. Many people will think they can just deploy a shitload of containers and be done... well, each and every single one of them has to be maintained, updated for securit…

The role of systems administration is changing. It's no longer building some servers that run and putting somebody else's code on it. Instead, it's working closely with the team producing code and helping build a mature deployment and management capability. It's about being a responsible expert on the bits outside of the application process. Containers help immensely here because they recognise that a product is comp…

> invest your time in helping this process along

You may find containers to be useful in this process. With rare exceptions, I don't, and the way you write this post with the implication that containerization is an unmitigated good grinds my gears. Disruptive and constant change leads plenty often down real bad roads, and unthinking embrace of every fad that comes down the pike has led to many more disasters than conservative thought has.

Re: Ex VMware, Microsoft and Citrix workers set up application container company

#42
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Puppet/Chef and general admin automation scripts handle the updates/config changes/etc... very easily without the added complexity of container management/orchestration.

Ha! I worked at [major tech company] and our Puppet runs took about 3 hours. Developing manifests was surreal - punch card era code/compile/test cycles. The worst and most frequent production outages were seemingly innocuous Puppet changes that made it through code review. Our puppet manifest was in the 10kloc range, most of them generated. Containerization is now letting individual teams manage app-specific configur…

If your Puppet runs take three hours and range into the thousands of lines, that's a disastrously poorly built Puppet environment. Blame your people, not your tools.

(And I say this as no fan of Puppet; I'm a Chef user. Where I've never seen anything remotely that deranged, even in dysfunctional environments.)

Re: Ex VMware, Microsoft and Citrix workers set up application container company

#43
post #35
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are great point, but as someone who is beginning to think what I can do with containers for my current infrastructure setup, so far my impression is container is not to change the infrastructure, but rather how compute is used. The meaning and the life cycle of container are no different from having a big virtual machine image, but container technology such as docker has been made blazing quick to start and kil…

I don't know much about CloudFoundry -- but with Kubernetes, are you saying that it's service discovery, access control, monitoring and insight analysis, credential management, version control and management are not addressed directly by Kubernetes, or perhaps, not mature yet? Just trying to get clarity on what you are saying here.

I can answer for CF. Service discovery, access control, monitoring, credentials and management are part of the core feature set -- because that's what distinguishes a platform from a single tool.

Version control properly lives outside the runtime environment, in my opinion; though these days CF has Gitlab integration points.

Re: Ex VMware, Microsoft and Citrix workers set up application container company

#44
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your haproxy, nginx, ldap, dns, nagios, sftp, ELK, imap, etc... services don't live more than a day or two? Interesting.....

When you run fully redundant services behind a load balancer, you don't need to worry about taking down one instance of a service for maintenance.

Good luck with your services that need to maintain state. Not everything is a stateless microservice.

Re: Ex VMware, Microsoft and Citrix workers set up application container company

#45
post #28

> Container hype is running high. Developers have flocked to the technology for more easily packaging applications and running them across various disparate environments. It's a hype that should die in a fire bigger than the one reserved for Adobe Flash. Many people will think they can just deploy a shitload of containers and be done... well, each and every single one of them has to be maintained, updated for securit…

Wow dude. Clearly you have not touched Docker. And if you have ever run a VM that is a container. Or I guess you are only using a mainframe? It's just a component like any component to any application. And there is plenty of tooling to help with updates and compliance, like CoreOS open source of Clair. Your point seems to come from another place because technically it's totally misguided.

DevOps guy who has the pain of working with Docker. I absolutely love getting to work with a product that breaks at point releases.

Oh, right. I'm supposed to have no life as a tech worker and spend countless nights dealing with container runtime issues in production because "It's The Wave Of The Future".

Re: Ex VMware, Microsoft and Citrix workers set up application container company

#46
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The role of systems administration is changing. It's no longer building some servers that run and putting somebody else's code on it. Instead, it's working closely with the team producing code and helping build a mature deployment and management capability. It's about being a responsible expert on the bits outside of the application process. Containers help immensely here because they recognise that a product is comp…

> invest your time in helping this process along You may find containers to be useful in this process. With rare exceptions, I don't , and the way you write this post with the implication that containerization is an unmitigated good grinds my gears. Disruptive and constant change leads plenty often down real bad roads, and unthinking embrace of every fad that comes down the pike has led to many more disasters than co…

I do find containers to be good although I'll admit I'm biased - I have several hundred thousand apps in production in containers, running in an efficient and scalable way that would not have been possible using prior technology.

My experience is that using containers effectivelly requires a substantial rethink of the infrastructure and how the teams using it work. The payoff though is a step change in productivity.

Over time, I believe that companies which embrace the change will deliver more quickly than those who do not. They will get products to market in a shorter timespan and generally be nicer places to work.

Will that mean the death of other ways of doing infrastructure? No probably not. After all, there are still mainframes and cobol programmers out there.

Re: Ex VMware, Microsoft and Citrix workers set up application container company

#47
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow dude. Clearly you have not touched Docker. And if you have ever run a VM that is a container. Or I guess you are only using a mainframe? It's just a component like any component to any application. And there is plenty of tooling to help with updates and compliance, like CoreOS open source of Clair. Your point seems to come from another place because technically it's totally misguided.

DevOps guy who has the pain of working with Docker. I absolutely love getting to work with a product that breaks at point releases. Oh, right. I'm supposed to have no life as a tech worker and spend countless nights dealing with container runtime issues in production because "It's The Wave Of The Future".

Care to explain what issues you have ran into and how recent it was?

Re: Ex VMware, Microsoft and Citrix workers set up application container company

#48
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gotten so much utility out of docker, it feels absurd to read this comment. Containers made the sysadmin part significantly easier, whether it was testing new Node releases, trying out random databases or learning new languages. Without containers I would be spending a lot of time configuring servers/VMs and failing at that. So strange.

> Without containers I would be spending a lot of time configuring servers/VMs and failing at that If it turns out during evaluation that setting up a simple Debian VM with the requirements of the tool, the tool ends up on the "black list" for me. No matter the possible productivity gains, I won't use anything needing more than two hours just to get started (i.e. running a Hello World).

Here you go: `docker run ubuntu:14.04 /bin/echo 'Hello world'`

Re: Ex VMware, Microsoft and Citrix workers set up application container company

#49
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without containers I would be spending a lot of time configuring servers/VMs and failing at that If it turns out during evaluation that setting up a simple Debian VM with the requirements of the tool, the tool ends up on the "black list" for me. No matter the possible productivity gains, I won't use anything needing more than two hours just to get started (i.e. running a Hello World).

No matter the possible productivity gains, I won't use anything needing more than two hours just to get started (i.e. running a Hello World). well that certainly helps frame your posts. In this case docker has a webpage that you can play around with. Maybe 10 minutes to get the basic idea. I'm struggling to find out where your hostility comes from. It doesn't make your job disposable, which it sounds like where your…

This thread has been stormed by people who work in the sys admin space and either don't care to learn the technology, have used it unsuccessfully while it was young, or see it as harmful to their career.

Re: Ex VMware, Microsoft and Citrix workers set up application container company

#50

> Pricing has not yet been set, but it will be a subscription, freemium model; A beta version of the software will be available soon. Buzzwords abound. How do they know a freemium model will be possible without losing money? Why will they put out a beta rather than starting with a "gold" version of the software? Articles like these do not bode well for their subjects. They read like symptoms rather than anything that…

How do they know a freemium model will be possible without losing money?

They don't, just like they also don't know if a non-freemium pricing model will be possible. They presumably wrote a business model that it'll be implemented and then reevaluated.

Why will they put out a beta rather than starting with a "gold" version of the software?

Probably because they want the benefits of having early feedback before investing too much work into it.

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