"Something that one smart developer can do in 100 lines on any interpretter is never worth billions of dollars."
100 lines maybe not, but docker is pretty lightweight glue riding on existing technology that did most of the heavy lifting. The valuation IS lopsided because it sort of did a "name grab" around the underpinning technology (sort of like "AJAX" was "XMLHttpRequest") and packaged it in a way that made it a more useful (some) and more importantly, talked about in a way people could understand, mostly giving it a name and describing some common practices was what happened.
The original idea was definitely clever though, and it is getting people who didn't adopt immutable systems before to start to understand immutable systems, even if the future is not actually going to be Docker. Yet, Docker is getting the press versus the higher level software that needs to exist to drive Docker.
While this makes it very hard for other projects to get VC attention, I think that's maybe a good thing for them if they don't know it - you want to bootstrap if you can anyway, and I hope many of them do.
While this isn't a super robust implementation or anything, I think it's important to show that Docker is more or less glue around existing concepts, and that there's still room to make better things.
Don't get me wrong, immutable systems are GREAT. Docker deserves points for getting people to understand them, and the ideas of private registries and Dockerfiles (though also not original) are good parts. Microservices? Not really neccessary for most people, that's more of a human problem. It sort of conflates immutable with microservices and makes you hop out of the norm to do the basics, but ok, sure, that's somewhat like a celebrity actor advocating for environmental causes. Still a good thing.
But is it a giant leap forward? Not as much as people think, compared to AMI builds, and you see folks running Docker on top of EC2 in cases (yes, they boot faster - but AMIs gave you immutable and things like Packer allowed redistributable images; stacking images is kind of sketchy if you don't control them all). But it's enough to make people use them, and that's a win, and someday the management software for it may be smart enough to make it feel as easy and powerful as that (fingers crossed for ECS?).
The 100 liner at least has the advantage of reminding people when people say "Docker is great" they mostly mean "I like this immutable systems thing and describing systems in text", and the other properties of Docker, and reminds people that if they can do better and try to make a better thing, they should also still try.
100 lines maybe not, but docker is pretty lightweight glue riding on existing technology that did most of the heavy lifting. The valuation IS lopsided because it sort of did a "name grab" around the underpinning technology (sort of like "AJAX" was "XMLHttpRequest") and packaged it in a way that made it a more useful (some) and more importantly, talked about in a way people could understand, mostly giving it a name and describing some common practices was what happened.
The original idea was definitely clever though, and it is getting people who didn't adopt immutable systems before to start to understand immutable systems, even if the future is not actually going to be Docker. Yet, Docker is getting the press versus the higher level software that needs to exist to drive Docker.
While this makes it very hard for other projects to get VC attention, I think that's maybe a good thing for them if they don't know it - you want to bootstrap if you can anyway, and I hope many of them do.
While this isn't a super robust implementation or anything, I think it's important to show that Docker is more or less glue around existing concepts, and that there's still room to make better things.
Don't get me wrong, immutable systems are GREAT. Docker deserves points for getting people to understand them, and the ideas of private registries and Dockerfiles (though also not original) are good parts. Microservices? Not really neccessary for most people, that's more of a human problem. It sort of conflates immutable with microservices and makes you hop out of the norm to do the basics, but ok, sure, that's somewhat like a celebrity actor advocating for environmental causes. Still a good thing.
But is it a giant leap forward? Not as much as people think, compared to AMI builds, and you see folks running Docker on top of EC2 in cases (yes, they boot faster - but AMIs gave you immutable and things like Packer allowed redistributable images; stacking images is kind of sketchy if you don't control them all). But it's enough to make people use them, and that's a win, and someday the management software for it may be smart enough to make it feel as easy and powerful as that (fingers crossed for ECS?).
The 100 liner at least has the advantage of reminding people when people say "Docker is great" they mostly mean "I like this immutable systems thing and describing systems in text", and the other properties of Docker, and reminds people that if they can do better and try to make a better thing, they should also still try.