What exactly did Docker affect?

"Editor's note" as the hottest technology in the 2014, Docker won the support of major manufacturers at home and abroad. In this paper, the Cloud stack technology VP Shi Haixu from the traditional virtualization, CaaS (container that is, services), iaas,paas,cmp, traditional isv,devops These several angles, analyzed the impact of Docker, the following is the original:

One of the most docker,14 words in the year has aroused thousands of attention. In the 2014, aside from the various technical content and links, we feel that from a more macro point of view and share our understanding of the Docker, relatively perhaps a more relaxed, more appropriate topic.

We dare not claim that the creation of the future is the best way to predict the future, we are only habitual to give our views. After all, without an opinion, there is no action.

Docker everywhere.

There is no doubt that Docker has become one of the hottest, even most disruptive, technologies in recent years. Internationally, almost all cloud-related companies are announcing, to some extent, the support and integration of Docker. In the June 2014 Dockercon, many companies shared their own stories about how to integrate with Docker. While each company achieves varying degrees of integration with Docker in different ways, they are all aware of the potential benefits Docker may bring. Microsoft,amazon,ibm,google,facebook,twitter,red Hat,rackspace and Salesforce and many other companies together to support a technology scene does not seem to be what we often see. At the same time, many of the domestic pan-cloud computing companies, internet companies, and even relatively traditional it vendors also docker more attention.

Why do giants like Microsoft or Amazon support Docker? Why is it like the previous PAAs players, such as Heroku and Google, also behind Docker, waving the flag? Docker's appearance, is not for all of these manufacturers to provide a new field, new arena? Can Docker really integrate IaaS and PAAs? Can we really believe that the above mentioned manufacturers will continue to support the unconditional Docker?

This series of questions has not been able to give an answer in the past 2014 years, but in 2015, I believe everything will become clearer.

The history of Déjà vu

If there is any other technology that has been widely supported by similar industries, I think it is java. When Java was released in the 90 's, every company expressed great interest until they realized that Java was actually a huge threat to their own platform. Java's vision is "Write once,run Anywhere", while Docker proposed "build Once,run anywhere,configure once,run anything". Both have, to a large extent, posed a potential threat to some companies. While we do not see a specific number of companies responding to possible threats, there is no guarantee that a history like Java or VMware will not happen again in the future.

At present, in fact, some heavyweight manufacturers in the Pan-cloud computing field, whether it is IaaS manufacturers, VM manufacturers or SaaS manufacturers, whether international companies or domestic enterprises, are constantly closely watching Docker, and assess the impact of Docker on their own business.

Traditional Virtualization

A few years ago, when Vmwae was just starting to provide workstation virtualization services, few could imagine that it could now be a major force in enterprise IT services and be able to achieve the current success. Over the next few years, VMware has extended virtualization to servers and is now expanding into the cloud computing world. For Docker and its ecosystems, the use of traditional virtualization experience, ultimately provide a more secure, more robust production environment services should also be one of Docker's goals. In fact, running Docker directly on bare metal is another alternative to traditional VMS.

Frankly speaking, compared with the traditional virtualization, Docker a series of problems still need to be resolved, such as lack of mature management tools, the ecosystem is large but still imperfect. But we still believe that Docker or container virtualization technology still has a great opportunity to solve these problems and ultimately achieve considerable success.

CaaS: Container as service?

There are already some emerging companies that offer container services (containers as a service) in some similar IaaS way. In the long run, perhaps the emergence of this CAAS model makes it possible to dynamically dispatch containers and move containers across the IaaS platform. Just as IaaS customers don't need to care about the real brand of their virtual machines, CaaS customers don't need to worry about whether his container is running on AWS or Ali Cloud. Customers will choose their desired geographic location and the container they want to run, and then the CaaS service provider will provide automated programs to help with provisioning, helping customers choose the cheapest or most appropriate public cloud platform.

Although this business model of providing Docker containers above IaaS is still to be discussed and observed, Docker has achieved great influence, and if Docker can play a role in more enterprises, especially in the actual production environment of enterprises, we believe that CaaS can also be expected.

Impact on IaaS Manufacturers

From startups to it giants, every company is aware of, or increasingly aware of, the benefits that hardware-based virtualization brings to the enterprise. The IaaS services provided by public cloud vendors such as AWS and Azure are more and more like public services such as water, electricity and coal. The advent of Docker makes it easier for these IAAS vendors to provide finer-grained computing resources, to further improve resource utilization and shorten resource opening times, thus providing the possibility of further compressing the cost of public cloud services. For services such as load balancing, caching, and firewalls for other IaaS, it can also be migrated to a container to provide better portability.

At the same time, for the hybrid cloud, VMware vchs (Vcloud Hybrid Service) and Microsoft Azure All emphasize the mobility of their VMS. In fact, because containers are lighter than traditional VMS, Docker containers can be set up and migrated dynamically. In terms of resource utilization and availability, Docker is ideal for deploying in a hybrid cloud and better able to play a hybrid cloud.

Impact on PAAs Manufacturers

Actually started earlier than Iaas,paas. PAAs is designed to help developers achieve the automatic adjustment of resources without having to face the problem of IT infrastructure management. Earlier, the PAAs would have been expected to surpass IaaS as the fastest-growing market in the cloud computing world. But a few years later, thanks to Amazon's huge success in IaaS, early PAAs players, such as Microsoft and Google, realized that IaaS was less barrier and more readily accessible to the market than PAAs. So now Microsoft and Google have been competing with Amazon in addition to the original PAAs domain in the IaaS sector.

In the case of PAAs, PAAs vendors want to provide a standardized, consistent environment, and enterprise applications, whether from development, management or operational dimensions have a variety of personalized needs. This difficult conflict between the two has hindered market recognition and acceptance of PAAs. In addition, each PAAs vendor provides its own services and APIs for the application, which makes porting between PAAs vendors difficult. Some organizations have made a positive attempt at PAAs migration, even in the hope of achieving migration across cloud service providers. But because of the lack of support from manufacturers like Google App engine and Microsoft Azure, it is hard to be a de facto industry standard.

The advent of Docker has made it possible for PAAs to provide services to developers in a more concise manner, and Cloud Foundry is currently supporting and integrating Docker containers. With Docker, developers no longer need to spend a lot of effort to handle the differences in development, testing, and production environments, and they can migrate a clean development environment directly into a production environment without worrying about various dependencies and configuration issues. This effectively solves the "dependency trap" that developers often face. Developers no longer need to learn additional programming to enable applications to run in PAAs, and their applications can run in Docker containers without any adjustments. At the same time, developers are increasingly considering micro service (Docker) as a way to implement their applications after the advent of the show. In the long run, Docker will make PAAs easier to manage and deliver services faster.

Overall, Docker has had an impact on the PAAs market that is still evolving and evolving. But it is too early to say whether this effect will accelerate the evolution of PAAs, disrupt the evolution of PAAs, or both. Although not very mature at the moment, Docker, through container-level virtualization, offers a solution to the environment dependency and portability problem for companies willing to try.

Management tools across the cloud

Cloudy management software is often referred to as the cloud computing Management Platform (CMP). CMP helps customers define the topology of application deployment by abstracting the underlying cloud platform. This topology is independent of the specific cloud provider or cloud platform. Customers can deploy their services through a specific cloud platform chosen by CMP. Through CMP, customers never have to deal with specific user interfaces or APIs for a particular cloud platform. In this way, through CPM, all the cloud platforms will be placed in the same competitive environment.

To avoid being bound by specific cloud platforms, CMP typically uses only the base computing units provided by the cloud platform, block storage, and object storage network services. Some CMP also deploys their own load balancing, database services, and application services to each cloud platform. This further avoids binding the application to a specific cloud platform. For example, when customers perform disaster recovery on AWS, through CMP, they can also choose to run their applications in their own private cloud environment based on a traditional VM.

In many ways, Docker provides a cross-platform porting capability similar to that of CMP. Customers can declare a docker mirror and associated topology through Dockerfile, and build the mirror into a specific cloud platform. Similar to CMP, through Docker, the network, database, and other services needed for additional management can be deployed in containers to meet specific needs.

At the same time, some new Docker based management tools also provide a container management function for cloudy platforms. In fact, this overlaps with CMP functionality, and some CMP manufacturers are also evaluating the impact of Docker.

Like PAAs, we are not sure that Docker will increase the need for CMP, or vice versa?

At the same time, does the presence of Docker make the application's fault tracking and processing more complex? And will the cloud management platform integrate the management of Docker?

Impact on traditional ISVs

For traditional ISVs, it may be a trend to introduce Docker throughout the SDLC (Bae Development life Cycle) Link. The introduction of Docker will greatly solve the problem of configuration dependency in addition to the development and testing within the ISV, thus improving the overall efficiency. We believe that continuous integration and continuous delivery at the core of the container, which ultimately delivers the container as an ISV to the customer, to the customer's cloud platform, will be highly efficient for ISVs and their customers.

While it is unclear whether more ISVs are recommending Docker to their customers, more customers are demanding that ISVs be developed based on Docker or both. But we believe that Docker in the enterprise application market, similar to VMware before, will be widely used.

Impact on DevOps

At present, although there are many kinds of devops tools in the market, we hope to help solve the gap between developers and operators. But the advent of Docker, in fact, provides a framework that fits well with the devops idea. Based on Docker:

developers can focus more on their code, without having to worry about how to run them in a production environment; when deployed, the operations team can view the container as a self-contained and complete module; Docker hierarchical file system, making environment configuration easy to manage and maintain; Like a git workflow, Through Dockerfile, even complex, heterogeneous development, testing environment can still be managed efficiently, even in the same VM, multiple containers can still run many different environments;

We believe that Doker is likely to have a significant impact on the ecosystem of DevOps, and may even radically change the way development, operation and collaboration approaches, and will have a significant impact on the ongoing integration and ongoing deployment of solutions in the marketplace.

things always go forward, though not necessarily in the way we think

It's written in the back.

Docker is facing similar challenges that Java has faced before. Given that Docker is likely to disrupt or even subvert existing markets, many companies are paying close attention and assessing the impact of Docker on their business, and if necessary, we believe that these companies will exert influence on Docker companies in different ways. Docker companies may become more cautious in the future.

But we are more willing to look from another point of view, we believe that the Docker representative of this type of container virtualization technology has made great strides, regardless of Docker company itself in the future, the development of container virtualization technology and promotion, will bring profound industrial impact. (Author/Shi Haixu Zebian/Zhou Xiaolu)

Author Introduction: Shi Haixu, Cloud Stack technology VP, many years of experience in enterprise it. Cloud stack technology is a focus on Docker and other container-like virtualization technology emerging companies. In the Enterprise service domain, provides the Docker and so on container virtualization solution for the enterprise, helps the enterprise to enjoy the new technology to benefit better. If you are interested in this article, you can contact him in the following ways: email: Shx@nicescale.com, micro-signal: HUBERYSHX.

"Related activities" Docker Shanghai Meetup event will be held on January 18, 2015 at Ucloud Moore's conference room, where 鞥 Fu: co-partner of the joint branch, Dr. Wu Bingzong, "Application Container" Docker "and Infrastructure container" Joyent " Smartmachines integration, point-thaw network operation and maintenance technology director Wan Lintao "Docker in the DevOps process of use (to point to the Internet financial applications as an example)", Cisco Senior Engineer Yang Zhangxin " Kubernetes system Architecture (Kuberenetes of the core components of the implementation of the principles and work together), as well as Ucloud senior technical experts Rocheng to the "Docker and database application of the combination." Registration Address: http://huiyi.csdn.net/activity/product/goods_list?project_id=1646

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