Eight burning questions, including: Will containers kill the VM?
Docker is a hot topic this week. If you’re unfamiliar with what this
technology is or what it means for your business, here’s a guide.
What is it?
Docker is both an open source project and the name of a startup that
focuses on Linux Containers. Containers are the idea of running multiple
applications on a single host. It’s similar to compute virtualization,
but instead of virtualizing a server to create multiple operating
systems, containers offer a more lightweight alternative by essentially
virtualizing the operating system, allowing multiple workloads to run on
a single host.
Why all the hype?
Docker the company has released the 1.0 version of its product this week (read more about the 1.0 release here),
and in conjunction with doing so is hosting an event named DockerCon.
Docker Founder and CTO Solomon Hykes said the open source Docker project
has been downloaded (for free) more than 2.75 million times and more
than 460 contributors helped create this version. Docker has built up
partners to support its product and service providers are jumping on
board to offer Docker services.
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Where did containers come from?
Containers, and specifically Linux containers, are not new. Tech giants
such as Oracle, HP and IBM have been using containers for decades. In
recent years, though, the open source project Docker has gained
popularity as an alternative, or complement to virtualization.
Recognizing a market opportunity to provide support around the open
source project, a company named dotcloud was formed, but was renamed
Docker. In January the company received a Series B funding round worth
$15 million, led by Greylock Partners. Red Hat has committed a major
investment in the company as well. (Read more about Red Hat’s work with
Docker here.)
How do they work?
The open source project has two major aspects: cgroups, or Control
Groups, which define the compute, memory and disk i/o that a workload
needs; and namesakes, which isolate and separate each of the workloads.
Docker the commercial product has two major components as well: Docker
Engine, which is the core software platform that enables users to create
and use containers; and Docker Hub, a SaaS-based service for creating
and sharing Docker services. With the release of the 1.0 version and
Docker Hub, the company says it has more than 14,000 applications that
can be used with its containers.
Are containers a VM killer? Writes
tech blogger Scott Lowe. “Containers, on the other hand, generally
offer less isolation but lower overhead through sharing certain portions
of the host kernel and operating system instance.” Containers are an
attractive option for environments where there is only a single
operating system, whereas virtual machines and hypervisors can be useful
if there is a need to run multiple OSs in an environment. VMs are not
going away, but containers could offer a better way to run certain
applications instead of virtualization. (Read more about how containers
can replace VMs here.)
What are they used for?
One of the major benefits of containers is portability. Containers can
run on top of virtual machines, or bare metal servers. They can run
on-premises or in the cloud. This has made one of the earliest popular
use cases of containers be around software development. Coders can write
applications, place it in a container, and then the application can be
moved across various environments, as it is encapsulated inside the
container.
How much does it cost?
Docker the open source project is free to download from GitHub.
Docker the product offers privately hosted repositories of containers,
which are about $1 per container. See full Docker pricing here.
Who else is involved?
With all the buzz around Docker, many tech companies are looking to get
in on the action. Docker is building up its partnerships, too. The
commercial version of Docker comes with support from the company, and
integrations with a variety of other software platforms, including Linux
distros from Red Hat, SuSE and Ubuntu, and other services like
scheduling tools such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible and Jenkins.
Other service provider vendors are enabling Docker on their platforms.
Rackspace CTO John Engates, for example, wrote a blog post this week
saying that initially he and the cloud hosting company were not terribly
impressed with Docker. But then after customers started using it and
asking for Rackspace to support it, the company was “pulled” into the
community, Engates says. Now, they’re converts; Engates calls
containerization “next generation virtualization.”
Rackspace is using Docker to test and deploy new applications in various
environments; it’s even using containers in networking, because it
allows for multi-tenancy of software-based load balancers. The biggest
impact though, he says, could be the way containers could usher in an
era of portability of workloads across environments. “Docker could
provide the abstraction that makes swapping workloads between clouds
possible. They don’t have to be OpenStack clouds either. OS-level
virtualization makes the application agnostic to the underlying
infrastructure. Docker could enable spot markets for cloud computing and
the ability for users to find a best-fit solution for their needs.”
He goes on to list some of the ways users can get involved in the Docker community if they’re interested.
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