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Docker 1.11: The first OCI-compliant runtime, built on containerd

blog.docker.com

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Re: Docker 1.11: The first OCI-compliant runtime, built on containerd

#5
post #4

ELI5 the OCI & why it's important? I follow Docker from a distance and find it fascinating.

Disclaimer: I work at Docker.

Docker has become a de facto standard for executing programs in a portable sandbox (aka "container"). There were increasing demands for making it a "proper" standard, so last year we donated a spec and reference implementation for a universal intermediary format - a "PDF of containers" if you will, and partnered with the Linux Foundation to manage it. The majority of the industry followed.

Now that the Docker container engine supports this intermediary format, and other providers will soon follow suit, it reduces the risk of depending on one provider. If you want to switch away from Docker, you can run your containers elsewhere.

Now everyone can focus on building better tools, instead of trying to make "their" format win. The result is better tools.

Re: Docker 1.11: The first OCI-compliant runtime, built on containerd

#7
post #4

ELI5 the OCI & why it's important? I follow Docker from a distance and find it fascinating.

As an industry, we hadn't put down on paper what it means to build, execute or discover a container.

If you wanted to sit down and write software to build or execute a container, there wasn't a spec to follow or a checklist of the features you needed to support. Basically, you had no idea if what you wrote today would continue to work in the future. Or if someone else constructed a container, that you could run it.

(CoreOS employee)

Re: Docker 1.11: The first OCI-compliant runtime, built on containerd

#8
This is a huge upgrade that is super welcome.

Recently (on 1.9) we have seen quite a few cases where we had "zombie" containers, these are container that can no longer be started or stopped due to cgroup misconfiguration or something along those lines.

The new architecture means that for weird cases like this all we need to do is kill off runc without forcing every container on the box to restart (by restarting the docker service which is what we do now).

It is also really nice that you can now launch apps on runc direct without needing a docker intermediary.

Re: Docker 1.11: The first OCI-compliant runtime, built on containerd

#10
You know, standardization is a great thing. But, fuck, another major release with huge changes... What ever happened to stable architectures with hardening burn in periods? What new bugs are going to creep in due to these huge changes? How is this going to break our work arounds for previous versions?

It's a great time to be in operations, containers are a huge step forward, but how are we supposed to be confident in a technology with so many major changes every other month? Even Node.js has LTS releases.

And yes. Get off my lawn, too.

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