Orchard and Fig are joining Docker

http://blog.docker.com/2014/07/welcoming-the-orchard-and-fig-team/

by eloycoto • 12 years ago

144 30 12 years ago

blog.docker.com

Good and bad news: - Orchard close - First Docker office in Europe. - Fig continue up&running - New Developer Experience group

quarterto• 12 years ago

This is great news for the Docker community, and for Ben and Aanand. I knew Ben at university, great guy. With them looking after Developer Experience, I'm excited to see what's next for Docker.

kingrolo• 12 years ago

This is brilliant news. fig is really handy, and I'm hoping this means we now have an officially blessed way to manage multi container setups.

skrebbel5• 12 years ago

As an Orchard customer, I'm really happy about this. Orchard is a cool service, but their customer service is pretty amateuristic. I think they have all the potential of upping their game given sufficient resources (which I assume they are now getting). If Orchard becomes the go-to "just dump them containers in our cloud" solution for Docker, then great times are ahead!

EDIT: oh fuck, they're shutting down? damn, that's shitty. Also the link from the docker.com blog post to https://www.orchardup.com/blog/orchard-is-joining-docker is broken, and no info at all on https://www.orchardup.com/blog. Typical.

aanand4• 12 years ago

Very sorry you had to hear it from HN - we had our email, blog post etc. ready to go out but there was a scheduling mishap. We also emailed our active customers from last month in advance yesterday.

The space has matured a lot, so there are some great alternatives out there. Happy to help you migrate - give me a shout at aanand@orchardup.com

webmaven3• 12 years ago

Release Orchard backend as open source? Note: Consider why fig took off and Orchard didn't...

No one wants to be stuck on a provider that might not succeed and have to migrate to a different one unless the new provider is drop-in compatible. It is nice that you are providing migration instructions and help, but the very idea of being at the mercy of an acquired platform's team is what stops me from trying such services in the first place (after being burned by ep.io, 30loops, etc.).

skrebbel5• 12 years ago

Hi! I admit that when the blog post was down, there was this part of me deep down that feared that it was going to say "we'll pull the plug this weekend, good luck!". That might have made my comment feel a bit too bitter. Sorry about that.

We saw a bunch of nice alternatives pop up actually - and admittedly we were already in the process of moving over to one (Tutum, probably, unless you have better ideas :D), because we realised that you two are much better coders than you are hosting providers :)

Congrats on the move and good luck with the London office!

ilaksh• 12 years ago

Why are you shutting down Orchard? Seems like a great service.

Is Docker going to have its own thing like Orchard?

peterwwillis• 12 years ago

If it's a really useful service somebody could re-implement their API as a new open-source backend that existing clients could use. (Personally I don't know why you wouldn't just make a couple bash scripts and a makefile to manage these things, but I guess not everyone's into making their own sausages)

terhechte• 12 years ago

I really love fig, it is a great tool to easily deploy multiple containers without a hassle and without having to know the intricacies of the docker command line. I nowadays use it for all my projects. Great to see it joining Docker. Very cool.

jonty• 12 years ago

SO pleased for Ben & Aanand, this is the best possible outcome for Orchard/Fig. Brilliant news.

justincormack• 12 years ago

Great news that Orchard are staying in London and there is now a European Docker office.

skrebbel5• 12 years ago

Is fig going to stick around and be improved, or are Ben and Aanand going to drop it and make something slightly similar right into Docker? We're currently not using it, but maybe we should.

aanand4• 12 years ago

A bit of both. Fig is going to stick around, but over time parts of it will find their way into Docker. It won't be deprecated unless there's a better official solution.

skrebbel5• 12 years ago

Thanks, I appreciate the honest and direct answer. If we're looking to replace a bash hack now (which works but isn't the prettiest), would you recommend diving into Fig or waiting until Docker becomes Figgier?

patja• 12 years ago

I always thought this was Orchard: http://www.orchardproject.net/

zo12• 12 years ago

I was also very confused, and the first google search for Orchard was the one you came across. My first thought was, "this is an .Net CMS, I thought docker was unix-based?"

Then I was like, Okay, let's go see what "Fig" is. None of the links on the first search page were for Fig. I got everything from food websites, stock codes, to random content-spam URLs with Fig in it.

I'm sorry, but these guys really picked bad names for their products. It's really ridiculous because those names have well-established meanings. Sure, if they get famous enough, their rankings will make their alternate-meaning of those words bubble up. But until then, they're invisible to most of the web.

Heck, the linked article doesn't even have a link to Orchard, but rather to a blog post on their domain. If anyone really struggles, here are their links:

http://www.fig.sh/ https://www.orchardup.com/

*Edit: Searching for "Fig Software" led me to software companies with "Fig" in it, and some Facebook pages. Again, not the actual Fig I was looking for.

sashahart• 12 years ago

Naming projects without any collisions is really hard to do, unless you like names like 'e31239'.

mplewis• 12 years ago

http://blog.docker.com/2014/07/welcoming-the-orchard-and-fig... features links to Orchard and Fig in the first sentence.

sandGorgon2• 12 years ago

Is fig the authoritative way to deploy a bunch of Docker instances for a fairly basic stack - web server, DB, elasticsearch ?

I started off thinking about Ansible, but it seems most people on #docker were using Fig. But I dont know what people are doing in production

aanand4• 12 years ago

Fig works in production, but it's not our focus. We wrote a blog post on it a while back - it's Orchard-specific, but covers what you need to think about, especially in the "Configuring for deployment" section:

https://www.orchardup.com/blog/develop-and-deploy-an-app-wit...

sandGorgon2• 12 years ago

Are you planning on retaining fig in its current form or probably merging it into Chef/Ansible?

In the long term, do you believe that having a very specific CM tools is going to be better than supporting something having a lit of mind share?

superuser2• 12 years ago

The APIs are pretty simple. You could most likely write the orchestration you wanted in a shell script full of calls to curl, or do the same in a nicer scripting language with a decent JSON and http library. I'm working on a very simple orchestrator along the lines for my own needs, as well as a Sinatra application that serves nginx configs to load-balance all the containers running a particular image on a set of hosts.

There are many tools in this space, but it's also not hard to write your own - you're just wiring together some REST APIs.

tlrobinson• 12 years ago

I hope Fig or something like it makes it's way into official Docker tools.

After wrestling with "Makefile orchestration" for Docker containers then discovering Fig, it's clearly a useful tool.

outside1234• 12 years ago

Question - has anyone gone whole hog on deploying containers? If so, are you using something like CoreOS or something else to deploy them?

Orchard and Fig are joining Docker

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