The Rocket containerization system

Posted Dec 4, 2014 16:30 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
Parent article: The Rocket containerization system

> . Primarily, the CoreOS team's concern is Docker's expansion from a standalone container format to a larger platform that includes tools for additional parts of the software-deployment puzzle.

Well yes, CoreOS sells tools and additional parts for software deployment using containers so having Docker standardize on something other that what CoreOS wrote is a major competitive problem for them, they need to funnel people into their ecosystem to be able to extract revenue. So this seems primarily a business decision rather than a technical one, they don't want to compete on a platform that they don't control, so they are creating an incompatible platform that they do control and competing with that.

In some ways this shows how much competition really isn't affected by having the software be Free or Open Source, having software be proprietary is a disservice to the customers and you can be just as competitive without it.

The Rocket containerization system

Posted Dec 4, 2014 19:41 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

Taking what's been posted here at face value, I think it's less not wanting to compete on a platform they don't control and more not wanting to try and compete where they can't just replace one part of things and are stuck with a monolithic component that they have to work around rather than being able to replace a layer.

I will refrain from drawing parallels with the systemd discusssion ;-)

The Rocket containerization system

Posted Dec 4, 2014 22:06 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

> I think it's less not wanting to compete on a platform they don't control and more not wanting to try and compete where they can't just replace one part of things and are stuck with a monolithic component that they have to work around rather than being able to replace a layer.

I'm having a hard time parsing the sentence because it seems to hold two opposing ideas simultaneously but I think that saying that Docker is a monolithic component that can't be replaced is logically mutually exclusive of the fact that they have replaced it.

> I will refrain from drawing parallels with the systemd discusssion ;-)

Also two opposing ideas in the same sentance, nice. 8-)

CoreOS heavily relies on systemd and the dbus API, that's how fleet controls services, a better parallel would be if systemd were a single-vendor rather than representing a consortium of the major distros and device makers, and if this mythical systemd vendor came out with a competing system with their own HA and config synchronization built into systemd directly. Project Atomic is the closest to that but there is a much more level playing field between Atomic and CoreOS, both participate in systemd, neither has authority over the other.

The Rocket containerization system

Posted Dec 4, 2014 22:11 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

> I'm having a hard time parsing the sentence because it seems to hold two opposing ideas simultaneously but I think that saying that Docker is a monolithic component that can't be replaced is logically mutually exclusive of the fact that they have replaced it.

they can't replace part of it because it's monolithic, so they are replacing all of it.