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\[23:59\] Docker came out of raw operational experience, and then of course, it got picked up by a really excited developer community, and we had to manage this diversity of opinions and needs that we talked about earlier in the community. But the point is in 2012 we definitely were a company of cranky ops that looked ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow... So you pretty much sold it based on you being (for lack of better terms) the boss, and hacking on things and "let him do his own thing." |
**Solomon Hykes:** Well, what happened is I didn't have to sell it, because the engineer that got loaned to me for this side-project quit, and... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...there was no pushback. |
**Solomon Hykes:** It was only me... \[laughter\] So then I got another engineer - Andrea - who still today is a star engineer at Docker, and he wrote the hard system's interface... He wrote the interface to LXC, and I wrote the UI, the front-end, basically. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Any particular features early on in Go that drew you to it? That's kind of what I was trying to drive to what specifically about Go made you really-- I know you said compiling to a binary and you can kind of reduce the trouble and that kind of stuff, but what else? |
**Solomon Hykes:** Those were the external reasons, specifically why Go for this project (Docker), but as a hacker, what drew me instinctively to Go was really -- by training I'm a C systems engineer that got into Python because at some point it was just a waste of time to do everything in C, and from there we got into... |
At DotCloud we did everything with Python plus gevent, and then sometimes we regretted not having an easier way to leverage C. So in comes Go, which is basically, from the perspective of a C hacker that uses Python, the perfect hybrid of the two. It's got all the benefits of C - it's compiled, it's lightweight, you hav... |
I think Go brought the kind of reassuring focus on a quality, reliable standard library early on. So it just hit all the sweet spots. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I know that we are a few minutes over the break that Adam was tracking, as he always does, so let's go ahead and take our sponsored break for this episode. Our sponsor for today is Toptal. |
**Break:** \[27:39\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** Alright, we are back, talking to Solomon Hykes. Carlisia, I know that you had a follow-up question to Adam just before the break... Do you wanna go ahead with that? |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah, so Adam asked a good question, and I don't think we got to the answer. Adam asked "What impact did Docker have on Go's popularity?" Was that question answered? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't know, I think he was talking towards the \[unintelligible 00:28:43.01\] and some of the features of Go, although I would love to hear that. We hear from someone like Matz, the creator of Ruby, and the impact that Ruby on Rails had to Ruby... You, Solomon, as someone early on in 2012 choosing... |
**Solomon Hykes:** I sometimes ask myself that and I don't really know, to be honest. My feeling is I think early on Docker using Go was a validation for Go in the phase where it was clearly picking up, but it was still useful to be able to point to large scale projects using it... And I think at some point, briefly, w... |
I think now we're one citizen of a Go city among many others, so we're contributing in that way, but we're not longer at the phase where Go needs to point to any particular project to justify using it. I think it's a mainstream language now, which I think is great. |
**Erik St. Martin:** That's really interesting, because kind of the same timeframe Brian and I, when we were planning the first [GopherCon](https://www.gophercon.com), didn't want to plan it in San Francisco for a similar reason, where we wanted to try to prove that this was an outside of Google thing, that it wasn't j... |
**Solomon Hykes:** Yeah, and I remember actually going through the process... We did a little bit of due diligence... Like I said, I decided in my heart and soul, and then after the fact I pretended to go through proper intellectual due diligence, and I remember we looked for proof points, and definitely there were no ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Vitesse. |
**Solomon Hykes:** Yes, exactly... I think they open sourced it since, but at the time it was not open source... But they talked about it and they said it was written in Go, and they said that the whole critical path of MySQL queries for the frontend of YouTube.com went through that. I did a quick back of the envelope ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Nice. |
**Solomon Hykes:** So that was my validation point at the time. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, I remember trying to get Vitesse running... It was ridiculously cool. So we're kind of talking about nostalgia, and I'd like to start moving towards the growth and Docker in its current state. But one question I have is like, adopting so early, and even leading up to now, there wasn't a lot o... |
**Solomon Hykes:** \[32:17\] Nothing major. We had a lot of tactical stumbling blocks, especially in the second year when we started really moving down closer to the system. The thing about Docker is in the early days it was a wrapper around this pre-existing command line tool called LXC, and actually one of the motiva... |
The point is because we did the wrapping, we did not need a lot of sophisticated interfacing to the system early on. We just literally shelled out to the LXC tools, and then we parsed the output and stuff like that. So we didn't really push the limits of the standard library... I mean, we had bugs and instabilities and... |
Then in the second year when we replaced LXC and we implemented this library called LibContainer that actually hits Linux kernel capabilities directly -- we had things there, but honestly, there's no particular instance that I can really remember... Honestly, given the level of adoption and maturity of Go, I've always ... |
We've always adopted the latest version of Go for the latest version of Docker. We've never lagged behind, thinking "Oh, let's wait until someone else goes through the pain and then we'll upgrade." The Go project has trained us to just trust their latest stable releases... Which, by the way, I think it took us a while ... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** So how about today? Is there a point where you say, "Well, it makes sense to use an existing library that's external to the standard library"? Or does Docker or Moby have a philosophy of saying "We don't use external libraries; we use the standard library and we write everything ourselves"? Do yo... |
**Solomon Hykes:** Well, first, I heard the word "Moby", so can I suggest that I address that afterwards? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, we're gonna open that topic up soon. |
**Solomon Hykes:** To answer your question, first of all, I don't really make those rules anymore... We've delegated these decisions to a lot of the maintainers, but I think we've just followed common sense rules. If the standard library does it, use the standard library; if there's an external library that does it, ch... |
\[35:53\] If none of the above is true, then write your own, but be careful to not waste too much time. If it turns out that a lot of other people needed that and they end up using your implementation, then as soon as possible spin that out into a separate, independent library so that it's not too tied into your projec... |
I think that's what we followed, but I think everything I just said applies to any \[unintelligible 00:36:18.05\] software project. I don't think we've done anything out of the ordinary. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** That sounds sensible, yes. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So here we are today... We are four years(ish) later. Docker is cool, everybody is using it... We're in a whole new world where Docker is basically the Xerox of containers. You've owned the name. If you talk about containers, you essentially say Docker, right? That's the case we're in, and it seems ... |
News came out - I guess it's been about three weeks, maybe a month... I've kind of been in my own life for a bit and also I'm not really sure on the timeline, but you've transitioned to this new piece here and you've changed a lot about this brand name, this really well-known brand name of container/Docker, and... How ... |
**Solomon Hykes:** Yeah... So it's definitely a big change, and it's a change that, like any big change, it will take a while for the dust to settle. So it's a change that's really incremental; it's an ongoing change. It's just that at some point you need to kick it off, and [DockerCon](https://events.docker.com/events... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, so it was about a month ago then. |
**Solomon Hykes:** Yes, exactly. So there has been a lot of work and gradual changes before that moment, and there's gonna be a lot of gradual changes and work afterwards, but I think for a lot of people this announcement of course is when they first heard about it. The point is really it's a fundamental shift and we'v... |
Docker today, on the one hand, is a platform that developers use to develop their applications, and operators use to deploy and manage their applications, and we're seeing that in small projects (hobbyists), small businesses, and now enterprises. So there's some very large organizations that have developers using Docke... |
Then there's another aspect, which is an open source project where specialized, passionate hackers are working together on the code that leverages all this technology to do container things, right? Container runtime, container networking, container storage etc. We've got this whole open source community of system hacke... |
\[40:07\] So the key thing to realize is the switch to Moby affects that second group, the open source contributor community, in a positive way; that's the goal. The goal is to improve things for the open source community. |
It does not affect our user community at all, or our customers. Or if it does, it's indirectly, meaning that if you zoom out from this community that we're in right now -- anyone that has ever gone to github.com/docker/docker is in that group, the smaller group, the more specialized and better-informed group that is in... |
But as far as everyone else using Docker is concerned, nothing has changed. Docker is Docker, it's still being updated in the same way, it's got the same features, it's got the same interfaces, it's got the same free version and paid version... So to set the context, it's an important dimension to keep in mind. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So I guess that's one of those perception things, and a little bit of confusion, as... Yeah, I think a lot of people thought "Oh, it's a Moby container now, and now I run the Moby command", and what you're basically saying is if you're not touching the code of Docker, you would never know. If you'r... |
**Solomon Hykes:** That's exactly right. I think part of the reason for that confusion is that we did not explain that well enough. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** If you don't mind me saying it, it seemed like it was delivered -- I wouldn't say prematurely, but it just seemed like you didn't pay enough attention to the impact, maybe... I don't know, it seemed a little bit just sort of thrown out there. Do you feel like that's how it was executed, or do you fe... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think when you're too close to the problem you don't necessarily see the way people on the outside see things, so working on the project, you're like "Oh, it makes total sense. We work on Moby; it's basically an upstream to Docker. People use Docker, all is good..." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Which is why I opened it up with the whole Docker compared to Xerox, because I think in my opinion - and I think in a lot of developers' opinion - when you think of containers, you think of Docker. So when you mess with the brand name of containers or this movement, so to speak, you were sort of lik... |
**Solomon Hykes:** Yeah, so I think it's a totally fair question. Definitely a lot of care has gone into the whole thing; a lot of us have been working on this change for a year and a half... |
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