Docker : An Interview With Solomon Hykes

http://www.activestate.com/blog/2013/06/solomon-hykes-explains-docker

by philwhln • 13 years ago

88 8 13 years ago

ivan_ah• 13 years ago

Ah OK, now I get it. It's what you would want from a VM (isolation & reuse) without all the data duplication of the VM image files, and the memory requirements associated with provisioning and running many VMs.

The copy-on-write aspect is very neat.

philwhln4• 13 years ago

That's right. It's closer to the software layer than the infrastructure layer, so there's a lot more flexibility. You could essentially run a few machines on bare metal and use Docker as the virtualization layer. Just need an OS that supports LXC and you're good to go.

porker2• 13 years ago

Does Docker work in the same way as Solaris/Illumos zones, or FreeBSD Jails (or Verio's equivalent [1])? Docker appears to add portability, but no security.

I ask as virtualising this way (thinking about secure shared hosting) is of interest to me, vs multiple VMs, and I'm curious about the advantages and disadvantages of each.

[1] http://support.verio.com/files/pdf/FreeBSD_VPS_v3_Technical_...

philwhln4• 13 years ago

Docker is built on-top of Linux Containers (LXC). These provide a secure isolated environment within Linux.

http://www.activestate.com/blog/2011/11/security-cloud-stack...

porker2• 13 years ago

Thanks philwhln, I'd understood that much :) I guess I'm asking: What would be the selling point of using Docker (LXC) over Jails/Zones?

jabbernotty• 13 years ago

I'm not entirely clear on this yet, but it sounds like it could be very useful for load-testing a particular service I'm working on. Testing the service requires a series of directories to be present for each client. It sounds like this docker+busybox combination could be used for this.

philwhln4• 13 years ago

+1 Sounds like a good use-case. You'd be able to fire up lots of clients very quickly.

Docker : An Interview With Solomon Hykes

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