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The truth is that we have all those building blocks, and there's so many these days, including containers. Thank you, Solomon. \[laughs\] So now, the choice is even more difficult of "Well, what do I choose?" And then you have serverless, and you have monoliths... So application - what does application mean to you? Bec... |
**Sam Alba:** So what I saw in the past few years is a lot of people try to take their own specification of their application as it is internally in their company and try to make a standout with it. We saw a lot of different initiatives, including inside Docker with that at some point like is the application your compo... |
Something on your iPhone - it's easier to think about what is an application on your phone, although until you've put your credit card on the App Store and installed some applications, it's still an application deployment. So I think the same thing applies for any type of application out there. So to talk a bit more ab... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So my understanding is that what Docker did for packaging code is what Dagger wants to do for application delivery. Is that a correct summary, Solomon? Would you agree with that? |
**Solomon Hykes:** \[11:57\] In one dimension, yes. I mean, there's major differences, but there was something we were trying to do when we worked on Docker, and there were multiple opportunities, and we get to choose one. Docker made a choice to focus on being a next-generation runtime for applications. It's a new way... |
But what we worked on that led us to Docker initially was a different goal - we were trying to standardize; we were trying to unify the industry around something, anything, so that we can all leverage at least one thing that we all had in common. But it turns out once you enter the arena as one possible runtime, you ca... |
What we're doing is we're rooting for everyone to define their own answer... The answer to "Where's the line between application and infrastructure, and how do you connect them?" It will be a different answer for each software team, we believe. There'll be patterns, commonalities that will come and go, but yeah, your d... |
**Break:** \[15:07\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** What you've just told me makes a lot of sense. And the reason why it makes a lot of sense is because having spent a really long time in this space, I can see it. But what I don't know is how exactly does this solution that Dagger proposes actually work. So how do teams and application developers decla... |
**Sam Alba:** So I'll start with this one... First of all, we -- |
**Solomon Hykes:** Sorry, I had to do it... \[laughter\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** No, that's good. |
**Sam Alba:** Alright, we'll start again then... \[laughter\] |
**Solomon Hykes:** Sorry. Go ahead. |
**Sam Alba:** So we use a config language that you know and you probably mentioned already in the podcast, I'm not sure... It's CUE. I think you talked to Marcel. You interviewed him. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes. |
**Sam Alba:** So people who are familiar with the show know the language already... Which is good for Dagger, to be honest, because the language is not well-known yet, and so it will help as the language progresses for onboarding with Dagger. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So just to add a little bit, a clarifying piece... This is Go Time episode 163, "CUE: Configuration Superpowers for Everyone." By the way, that's the reference. That's the exact episode that you can go and listen to to hear more about CUE. So CUE is one of the building blocks of Dagger. |
**Sam Alba:** Yes, and so CUE provides a very compelling and powerful configuration language, that platform engineers or application developers - I mentioned civil wars because it's always someone different in a company who does take care of the CI/CD pipeline in the internal platform by extension. |
So they use CUE to declare everything that they have to do in order to take the code from the code repository all the way to running the code live on any environment. Dev station or prod. So Dagger right now offers through CUE a way to define all of that, everything. The way it works roughly is -- so you use the CUE la... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[19:59\] What is a package, by the way? Can you give us an example of a package? Because that's a fairly important concept. |
**Sam Alba:** Yes. So CUE offers the ability to import packages, first of all... And Dagger piggybacks on these to provide a standard library of packages of reusable building blocks. So one of these packages, for instance, is the ability to manipulate a Git repository to deal with the GitHub authentication, to integrat... |
Recently we added a package for Argo CD. That was a contribution from someone in the community. The idea was to - from the application delivery pipeline to generate an Argo CD configuration and call Argo CD directly from Dagger. So there is a reusable package now. |
Dagger also has the ability to define packages that you can share and import. So they don't have to be (all of them) inside the standard library. We only add packages that we think are general building blocks that people can reuse. |
We also have packages that are cloud provider-specific - GCP, AWS... Inside GCP there is a package for GKE, dealing with the authentication. Then they all generate Kubernetes clients that you can reuse... So you can import those packages and use them pretty much like you would do in a programming language like Go, for ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So Dagger takes some inputs. There's also outputs, I assume. The outputs are a result of the packages running, or the definitions that call packages? Would you call that a plan? Is that a plan in the Dagger language? |
**Solomon Hykes:** Yeah, so the development flow that Sam described, what you're doing there is you're writing -- that's when you're writing a configuration for Dagger. So you're telling Dagger how to deploy your stuff. And without Dagger, you would typically do that in a bunch of places, which is one of the problems. ... |
There's a lot of custom and reusable tools out there for deploying from your laptop. Then sometimes you're gonna reuse the same scripts on a deployment server, a staging server, maybe you'll bring it into your CI... But then what happens in your CI is that CI wants to be CI/CD; because if you only do CI, there's not en... |
And then what happens is your CI/CD process is in place. It uses Circle CI, GitLab, GitHub, Jenkins, whatever, and it's very, master that Yaml thing, and you update it and you add -- now, sometimes there's an Action thing on GitHub, for example, a Docker container you plug in... So you start kind of adding things, and ... |
\[24:20\] So you have this fragmentation problem where the actual deployment logic is split up into lots of different pieces, using different languages... So you can't reason about it as a whole, number one. And each piece is tied to a specific runner, a specific piece of CI infrastructure. So when you're writing a con... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I'm going to set the bar really high now, because you started with a very high bar... |
**Solomon Hykes:** Okay... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So the way I hear it is that this is the best thing possibly since Docker. |
**Solomon Hykes:** \[laughs\] Okay. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's what I hear. Because Docker changed the way we package and we run applications... Or even code. It doesn't have to be applications. It can be stateful stuff as well. Services. Whatever. So if what you're telling me is true - and I have no doubt about that - then there will be a world, maybe a n... |
**Solomon Hykes:** Yeah, I think that's true. Yeah. I mean, it has the potential to be that. I do think it has the potential to be as impactful as Docker. Certainly, I hope we'll be the ones to deliver on that potential, but I have zero doubt that someone will. And I don't see why not us, because we're doing it now and... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** It is. I can relate to that pain. I've been feeling it for years, but there hasn't been a solution that looked like it may work. And I think Dagger is the first thing that I have seen in recent years that may just work. It's a crazy idea, very ambitious, things can go whichever way... But the same thi... |
**Solomon Hykes:** Including us. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[27:50\] Including you, exactly. That's exactly what I'm thinking. So you didn't know just how big and successful it's going to be. And when Docker came along, everything changed - for application delivery, for running systems... A couple other things happened, like Kubernetes, for example. I think t... |
But I know that Dagger has also another special component, and that is not Docker, even though it makes use of Docker. It's Buildkit. Can you tell us a bit more about that relationship, Sam? Because I think that's the other big, important component in Dagger, which is Buildkit. |
**Sam Alba:** Yeah, absolutely. So Buildkit is indeed the other part that makes Dagger very powerful. Dagger has a -- it's in the name, the term "DAG", for Directed Acyclic Graph, which is pretty much the same execution flow that a makefile does, but in a more elaborated way thanks to CUE, and Buildkit, actually. |
How Dagger works under the hood - that's really a bit technical, in the sense that it doesn't have to be understood by users. Even developers, platform engineers who are developer a Dagger configuration - they don't have to understand that. Exactly like when people use Docker Build, they actually use Buildkit behind. B... |
So Dagger talks to Buildkit directly, and generates those instructions from CUE. And Buildkit offers a lot of different things - pretty much the same thing that you know from Docker file, it's just that in my opinion when you write a Docker file and you type "docker build", you'll probably use less than 10% of what Bui... |
So with Dagger today you can really step up the game by producing really fine-tuned execution from your configuration. So it's a bit abstract from when it's said like that and I'm sure Solomon will explain it better than me... |
**Solomon Hykes:** I don't understand it as well that that freezes me to explain it. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** This is what I propose... I was reading a blog post from Tõnis Tiigi introducing Buildkit. It's from 2017. And there's a link to a talk that Tõnis gave at DockerCon 2017, I believe. So I'll link it in the show notes. Watch that talk, which explains everything about Buildkit, including the LLB, how it ... |
**Solomon Hykes:** If there's one thing to take away from our explanation of Buildkit- there's a lot to cover, but the main thing that you won't get from that presentation is that everybody else uses Buildkit to build, and Dagger using Buildkit for much more than build. And I think it was already known that Buildkit is... |
\[31:49\] But we're taking it one step further and saying -- it's so powerful that the name is wrong. I don't know what it should be called. It's not just to build; it's a generic virtual machine for DAG computation. That's how we use it. And it turns out a great application of DAG computation, in other words writing y... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That sounds amazing. I can see how powerful that is. But the reality, at least for me, the implications of that is that I have to run Docker. And I uninstalled Docker on my machine about six months ago, and I don't have to update it anymore, I don't have to worry about licensing anymore, and there's a... |
**Solomon Hykes:** Not completely correct. You can use, if it's really important to you to use Dagger without any Docker engine, you can. Most people that we talked to choose to use it with Docker, because they have it... But yeah, not everyone has Docker installed, and not everyone must be forced to. Buildkit itself y... |
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