Live data from Hacker News

Billions wasted on Hadoop startups, the same will eventually be true of Docker

smashcompany.com

21–30 of 216 posts

Re: Billions wasted on Hadoop startups, the same will eventually be true of Docker

#22
> and number three – well it’s not even worth staying in business because there’s no money to be made,

I guess tell that to the 10s of companies doing PaaS. Or another 10s doing app monitoring / logging. They're successful companies, far from just "breaking even".

Re: Billions wasted on Hadoop startups, the same will eventually be true of Docker

#23
post #16
post #5

> The same will eventually be said of Docker. I’ve yet to hear a single benefit attributed to Docker that isn’t also true of other VMs, I bought a Raspberry Pi and using a few commands, installed pre-configured Docker ARM images for 8-9 different media applications that would've taken me days to setup and manage individually. I didn't have to worry about dependencies or compilations. It just worked.

Properly packaged Debian/raspbian apps are still an “apt install” away. Your use case, which is common, tells me that packaging / distributing may need some love, not that there’s a fundamental difference. And the convenience does not come free - a random docker is almost as bad as a random executable.

Packaged and configured are two different things. The fun begins, when you need several applications, which each have different ideas about configuring services, that would be otherwise shared.

Then, as a matter of convenience, you get packages, that either bundle everything preconfigured to their liking (i.e. gitlab omnibus) or packages, that configure shared services how they need it, and running them shared is not supported (i.e. freeipa, which will configure httpd as it needs and forget having anything else served on the same machine).

Docker provides a way to isolate these, so you can still use the same resources you have to run applications, that would not cooperate with each other on a single machine, without having to run separate OS instances in separate VMs.

Re: Billions wasted on Hadoop startups, the same will eventually be true of Docker

#24

Isn't this the way it normally works though, a bunch of investments don't work out - those are wasted - those that do work out, the people who did the investing get more money back. Or to put it another way: There must have been some few Hadoop investments that worked out, the same will eventually be true of Docker.

Shhhh get out of our ivory tower with your statistics about how the real world works.

/s

But yes, there's no reason to think that the distribution of successful, neutral and failure returns for Docker centric startups won't follow the usual distribution.

Re: Billions wasted on Hadoop startups, the same will eventually be true of Docker

#25

I don't understand how these are comparable. Hadoop solved a hard problem that nobody had. Docker solves a simple problem that everyone has. It would make sense if you're talking about kubernetes and using it to build hundreds of microservices because it's currently in fashion. Whether you're using Docker, Packer, Ansible or whatever doesn't matter. They are all a solution to the same problem and saying one is better…

>Docker solves a simple problem that everyone has.

Docker provides an (IMHO pretty buggy) isolation layer that lies between "keeping things that need to be kept separate in separate folders" and "keeping things that need to be kept separate in separate virtual machines".

I actually don't have the need for the level of isolation below VM and above folder very often. IMHO this level only really makes sense when containing and deploying somewhat badly written applications that have weirdly specific, non-standard system level dependencies (e.g. oracle) that you don't want polluting other applications' dependencies.

I've compiled and installed postgres in separate folders lots of times (super easy) and I've lost count of the number of times people have said "why don't you just dockerize that?" as if that was simpler and/or necessary in some way. That's the effect of "docker hype" talking.

Re: Billions wasted on Hadoop startups, the same will eventually be true of Docker

#26
Cloudera earnt $145m last quarter and grew by 37% over the previous quarter. Other Hadoop startups like Databricks are doing well and Docker has gone from a 2 digit revenue to a 3 digit revenue company from 2017-2018. How has billions been wasted when we have successful companies doing well against the toughest competitors ever i.e. Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

Re: Billions wasted on Hadoop startups, the same will eventually be true of Docker

#27
post #2

> ...but standard VMs allow the use of standard operating systems that solved all the hard problems decades ago, whereas Docker is struggling to solve those problems today. What are these supposed "hard problems" the author speaks of?

Sandboxed, consistent environments to run code in?

All this money should have been spent on developing new, improving existing or switching to better (operating) systems which solve the resource and communication security problems, instead of creating another inner-platform effect.

I hope WebAssembly goes in this direction, instead of trying to adapt to current programming language paradigms.

Re: Billions wasted on Hadoop startups, the same will eventually be true of Docker

#28
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on how "big" your data is. If you have data that is actually big (= doesn't fit onto a machine), then Hadoop is a reasonable candidate. Otherwise you are fine with a lot simpler tools. This has probably been true for quite some time, and companies are just slowly realizing now that their relevant data isn't actually that big. On the other hand computing power and storage has still grown in the last…

About 5 years ago I worked at a small, business oriented telco. The biggest ETL was processing external CDRs, applying call tariffs, and creating bills and reports. A previous developer had been adamant about using a Hadoop cluster to process this, storing all of it in Cassandra NoSQL. The idea was interesting, but it didn't quite work out. At some point he left the company and we had to do something about the pipeli…

Maybe that developer knew something unique about that use case i.e. data needs were expected to grow or they had plans to use it for Data Science (very common in telcos). And you just weren't aware of it.

It's always easy to pass judgement at technology choices but in my experience they are often made with the best intentions based on requirements that not everyone is aware of.

Re: Billions wasted on Hadoop startups, the same will eventually be true of Docker

#29

I don't understand how these are comparable. Hadoop solved a hard problem that nobody had. Docker solves a simple problem that everyone has. It would make sense if you're talking about kubernetes and using it to build hundreds of microservices because it's currently in fashion. Whether you're using Docker, Packer, Ansible or whatever doesn't matter. They are all a solution to the same problem and saying one is better…

>Docker solves a simple problem that everyone has. Docker provides an (IMHO pretty buggy) isolation layer that lies between "keeping things that need to be kept separate in separate folders" and "keeping things that need to be kept separate in separate virtual machines". I actually don't have the need for the level of isolation below VM and above folder very often. IMHO this level only really makes sense when contain…

The difference is standardization. Postgres can be installed in subdirectories nicely, as you say -- if you know how. Same is true for JBoss, CI build agent, whatever. Now if you have dozens of these apps then e.g. onboarding people in a remote team suddenly becomes non-trivial (a nightmare, to be precise). With Docker, they can get a complex system running in an hour.

The two primary use cases for Docker is, as far as I can see, is simplifying deployment on varying environments. Variations can happen because of many reasons. Sometimes you have clusters of various sizes in production. Sometimes the environment is a developer laptop. And so on.

Re: Billions wasted on Hadoop startups, the same will eventually be true of Docker

#30

I don't understand how these are comparable. Hadoop solved a hard problem that nobody had. Docker solves a simple problem that everyone has. It would make sense if you're talking about kubernetes and using it to build hundreds of microservices because it's currently in fashion. Whether you're using Docker, Packer, Ansible or whatever doesn't matter. They are all a solution to the same problem and saying one is better…

>Docker solves a simple problem that everyone has. Docker provides an (IMHO pretty buggy) isolation layer that lies between "keeping things that need to be kept separate in separate folders" and "keeping things that need to be kept separate in separate virtual machines". I actually don't have the need for the level of isolation below VM and above folder very often. IMHO this level only really makes sense when contain…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN