they maintain that these are containers and it's only a matter of confusion: https://twitter.com/spoonapps/status/538038020755456000
looking forward to clearer documentation if that's the case
Containers for Windows
21–30 of 44 posts
Re: Containers for Windows
#22All the people who diss this are nitpicking over details way too much. Yep, it's virtualization and not containers in the LXC sense, and yep, it's commercial-as-fuck and closed source. Yep, the linked blog post is mostly marketing blarp, announcing already-existing technology as if it's new by calling it different. That's pretty sad.
Still, Spoon is pretty cool, it allows you to do many of the things people use Docker for, on Windows: package an application, together with all of its dependencies, into a single image, and allow the user to run that single image and have it "just work" and start fast. Spoon virtualized executables start super fast, completely incomparable to starting a VM and then running a program in it, which is what everybody in this thread seems to be comparing this with.
Spoon also does this in a way that's much more accessible than Docker: A Spoon "image" is just a Windows executable, you can hand it to any user who's able to double-click an icon. That's really quite cool, especially for distributing desktop apps.
Reality is that Spoon does something that is about halfway between running an OS in a VM and LXC containers. If I were the marketing guy, I'd also call this containers, because so many of the benefits (including startup speed) are comparable. Calling it "virtualization" will make many readers think "slow, 10GB downloads, long startup times, little windows in a big window", none of which apply here.
Finally, all the ranting about how this isn't Docker at all distracts from something that IMHO is very interesting: Spoon is really decent technology, which has worked very great for very many years now (well before Docker even existed), even though it's been pretty niche among geeks.
It should also be interesting to HN how Spoon, the company, has managed to pivot its way through a changing landscape and different hypes. Not that long ago, Spoon's major product was a desktop program, Spoon Studio, that allowed you to package software with its dependencies for easy distribution. If you now look on https://spoon.net you're going to have a hard time finding that at all.
It's an interesting business! With cool technology! GitHub is closed source too, why all the hate?
Re: Containers for Windows
#23All the people who diss this are nitpicking over details way too much. Yep, it's virtualization and not containers in the LXC sense, and yep, it's commercial-as-fuck and closed source. Yep, the linked blog post is mostly marketing blarp, announcing already-existing technology as if it's new by calling it different. That's pretty sad. Still, Spoon is pretty cool, it allows you to do many of the things people use Docke…
On a marginally related note, I so wish Microsoft would offer free Spoon'ed IE6/7/8/9/10 executables instead of those humongous Windows VMs they have on http://modern.ie now. Spoon is perfect for solving this problem, and even if you only directly help Windows devs with it, I bet many devs on OSX/Linux have some Windows VM lying around somewhere. (Spoon actually offers this, but at a steep price)
Re: Containers for Windows
#24Spoon is very similar to VMware Thinapp, which I started 10+ years ago. Both have a lot of similarities to Docker, but there are important areas that cannot be addressed without Microsoft's support (see recent announcement between Microsoft and Docker). There are also other similar solutions in the industry like Microsoft AppV and VMware recently acquired a product called "Cloud Volumes". Similarities: - You can pack…
> Startup times will vary - mostly based on the app. Docker advertises millisecond startup times, Thinapp is probably in the 10s of milliseconds to startup [...]
The simplest test I can think of (`docker run busybox true`) takes 0.38s wall clock, pretty far out from your statement even when allowing for it stopping as well.
I've not seen millisecond startup times since pre-1.0 on any of my machines (there was a post on the mailing list about the mailing list about this slowdown a while back). When/where have you seen this advertised?
Edit: unless we're excluding the time for the implicit `create` from this, which doesn't seem like a very helpful metric.
Re: Containers for Windows
#25All the people who diss this are nitpicking over details way too much. Yep, it's virtualization and not containers in the LXC sense, and yep, it's commercial-as-fuck and closed source. Yep, the linked blog post is mostly marketing blarp, announcing already-existing technology as if it's new by calling it different. That's pretty sad. Still, Spoon is pretty cool, it allows you to do many of the things people use Docke…
On a marginally related note, I so wish Microsoft would offer free Spoon'ed IE6/7/8/9/10 executables instead of those humongous Windows VMs they have on http://modern.ie now. Spoon is perfect for solving this problem, and even if you only directly help Windows devs with it, I bet many devs on OSX/Linux have some Windows VM lying around somewhere. (Spoon actually offers this, but at a steep price)
Spoon used to offer these back in the day, they were brilliant. Unfortunately and perhaps not surprisingly they got taken down after about 6 months.
Re: Containers for Windows
#26> Spoon works through a small browser plugin.
Small as in 24.8 MB. That's not small.
Re: Containers for Windows
#27http://sp.parallels.com/products/parallels-containers-window..., not free but around for a while
Re: Containers for Windows
#28All the people who diss this are nitpicking over details way too much. Yep, it's virtualization and not containers in the LXC sense, and yep, it's commercial-as-fuck and closed source. Yep, the linked blog post is mostly marketing blarp, announcing already-existing technology as if it's new by calling it different. That's pretty sad. Still, Spoon is pretty cool, it allows you to do many of the things people use Docke…
So, an executable you can just run? Interesting that this is a feature to brag about. Reminds me of apps for Mac OS, in the years following 1984.
Sounds a bit like static-linking plus sandbox.
Re: Containers for Windows
#29Spoon is very similar to VMware Thinapp, which I started 10+ years ago. Both have a lot of similarities to Docker, but there are important areas that cannot be addressed without Microsoft's support (see recent announcement between Microsoft and Docker). There are also other similar solutions in the industry like Microsoft AppV and VMware recently acquired a product called "Cloud Volumes". Similarities: - You can pack…
The misunderstanding surrounding Docker doesn't seem to be getting any better.
Docker isn't actually a containerisation engine, it's simply an orchestration layer for Linux kernel components that implement the containerisation.
You shouldn't be comparing something that attempts to implement containerisation itself and something that simply calls OS APIs to do said containerisation.
In terms of cross version compatibility I don't think Microsoft intends to fix this. There isn't really any reason to. They could extend the SxS system to support multiple versions of core DLLs in different namespaces but I doubt that will actually happen.
The reason I doubt it will happen is that the hype around containers has nothing to do with lift and shift of legacy applications, but rather what new applications and platforms are possible with more efficient isolation and portability of runtime + application.
I would expect their efforts to be directed towards .NET, making it easy to package and application, the Global Assembly Cache and any native libraries it needs. Sure you could run any arbitrary application and there would but support for that but it's clear where their priorities lie.
PS: It's worth mentioning that Windows already has network namepaces support. It was implemented to support the virtual network gateways for VMM's NVGRE. I think it's safe to assume they will go the Linux route and implement separate support for process, permissions and filesystem namespacing too. The real show will be wether filesystem namespacing is done at VFS layer of if they implement it directly in NTFS or ReFS.
Re: Containers for Windows
#30Spoon is very similar to VMware Thinapp, which I started 10+ years ago. Both have a lot of similarities to Docker, but there are important areas that cannot be addressed without Microsoft's support (see recent announcement between Microsoft and Docker). There are also other similar solutions in the industry like Microsoft AppV and VMware recently acquired a product called "Cloud Volumes". Similarities: - You can pack…
I think it is easier to explain saying that ThinApp and Spoon use hooks while Docker uses kernel support isolation. App-V and Symantec Workspace Virtualization have also filtering drivers but they don't go as far in the kernel as LXC.
You can clone ThinApp behavior relatively in short time using hooking libraries.