Viral spread to commercial value, Docker create a developer-led business model

In the 2014, Docker quickly became the new favorite in the industry. At the Cloudopen conference in Chicago in August, Linux.com and the New Stack published a survey involving 550 practitioners. OpenStack was rated as the most popular Open-source project for the cloud, followed by Docker and KVM.

It is noteworthy that OpenVZ and other container technology existed very early, even more mature than Docker, why Docker development so fast? How does a Linux container become so popular? The author first summed up the following several reasons:

developers can figure out the principles of Docker in 15 minutes, install it and do a lot of useful things. As Marten Mickos discusses why MySQL is so successful, the principles that have been mentioned are simple, simple, but powerful! Docker is a pretty good name, it has a lovely logo, not only shows its function, but also easy to remember. Many people think that the project for engineers as long as the product is good enough, the name and logo is not important, but a good name is easier to adopt, and make a valuable brand. Docker, an amateur project initiated by the start-up company DotCloud, has attracted wide participation in the industry. If the same products from large companies, then Docker will not be so many partners, but a variety of alternative competitors, the container market will also be divided into several competing technologies.

The spread of the virus is not surprising to everyone, and it is difficult to have competitors. So everyone is working around this container solution. This is beneficial for both developers and users, but it also means that the PAAs service provider has lost the right to choose.

Even if you don't know or don't care what Docker is, I think it builds a developer-led business model. Rapid communication gets a large audience, becomes the industry leader, then translates it into commercial value and then gains.

The remaining question is, what interesting things did Docker do? What companies/technologies will it challenge? The author lists the following four points:

Portability: Docker is a portable container that can be packaged in any Linux application or service. The application of any language or framework running in a developer's notebook can be packaged and run without modification in any public cloud, private cloud, or bare metal, "build anythingonce, run Anywhere"! Efficient: The container starts at about 1 seconds. Virtual machines in a public cloud can start in a few 10 seconds to a few minutes, while starting a virtual machine on a portable computer may take several minutes because they start a full operating system each time. Flexible configuration: The Docker container can get the exact configuration of the application. When you update your application, you only need to replace the old version with a new version of the container, which takes only a few seconds. The configuration of each layer of the component remains isolated and is easily checked and regenerated. This makes configuration management work at build time, such as when generating Docker containers, but when running the Docker container, the chef service is not required to create multiple identical copies of the Docker container. Using this approach, Docker many tools like Cfengine, Puppet, Chef, ansible, or saltstack, all become unnecessary. Docker Hub App Store: Thousands of Docker containers have been shared on the hub.docker.com Web site, much like GitHub. Because containers are very portable, they provide a very useful cross-platform "App Store" for applications, while other "app stores" are tied to a particular platform (such as AWS Marketplace or Ubuntu JuJu charms) or tools (such as Chef supermarkets). The Docker hub is likely to eventually become an oversized software component market with huge business potential.

The above four points are relatively independent, combined and can produce greater value. For example, someone who started using Docker because of its efficiency and portability, then gradually discovered its features in configuring and applying stores, preferring Docker.

Docker technology is still quite new, is still adding new features, around its related projects and enterprises have sprung up, the Docker ecosystem has been generated, which technology in this ecosystem are worthy of our attention? The 2014 Container Technical Conference (Container conference 2014) will be held in Beijing on October 18, 2014. As the hottest container technology at the moment, Docker will be one of the most distinctive themes of the conference. Docker official and Google Kubernetes core personnel will preach China, and domestic internet companies will be the first to disclose their relevant practices. Click here to register!

Original link: Why Did docker Catch on Quickly and Why are it so interesting? (translation/Zhang Xin revisers/Zhou Xiaolu)