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**Gerhard Lazu:** Interesting. |
**Solomon Hykes:** But that demon is going to need to talk to something capable of running OCI containers. And that something could be the Docker engine, it could be Containerd, which often is bundled with a Docker engine... But you can run it separately, if that's your preference. I think there's calling runC directly... |
So these projects - Buildkit, Containerd - can be run remotely, and there is well-documented methods for connecting to them in management, then remotely via SSH for example, etc. So Dagger supports all of that. If you add your favorite custom Buildkit and/or Containerd infrastructure, either that you wanna build or tha... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** It is very cool, yeah. It is very cool. I love that world... And I'm wondering, if I was to use that option today, are there issues around, for example, volumes? Because that always used to be a problem when you would mount local volumes... Or like if you had to copy lots of stuff, and then the Docker... |
**Solomon Hykes:** Yeah. So the job of Buildkit is you define DAGs, graphs of things to do, of operations, and then you run it; there's a begging and an end, and then you get outputs. You provide inputs, you get outputs. Very powerful, very scalable, blah-blah-blah. But it does not use or depend on the concept of Docke... |
**Break:** \[35:36\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** This is something which I have to ask... I've been thinking about it and I have to ask it - how is Dagger different from TerraForm? |
**Solomon Hykes:** TerraForm is a great tool for managing your infrastructure, and Dagger is a great tool for making your CI/CD pipelines more portable, so that you can deploy all the different parts of your application in the same way, and deploy them from anywhere - a local machine, CI, other CI etc. If your existing... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That is a great answer, thank you very much for that. So with that in mind, I love tools that use themselves, like dogfood them, and you're basically the first users, so that you can see what doesn't work. I'm a big fan of that. Does Dagger use Dagger? In what way, Sam? Tell us about it. |
**Sam Alba:** So it's very important to us as well, because in my past in my career I worked on some products that we were not using internally, and it's always very difficult to just rely on your users to get feedback. You have to use your products. Honestly, sometimes it's not possible, somehow... But for us, we have... |
So there are a few areas where we use Dagger today, and a few areas where we'll use Dagger even more tomorrow. The first one that comes to mind is running the test internally. Right now we run all of our integration tests for the standard library, which is the reusable packages that Dagger provides. All of those tests ... |
\[40:03\] Then another advantage is to make -- since all of your tests usually should run in your CI, defining all of the CI logic on your CI system is very challenging, because developing your test is software development, and as any software development, it has to be maintained and evolve over time, and grow... And d... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Oh, yes. |
**Sam Alba:** ...tried CircleCI, and GitHub Actions... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** All of them. I know what you mean exactly. |
**Sam Alba:** Yeah. And so replacing all of that with a Dagger app, so you can just develop your tests locally... And then your CI just needs to do the same, as a simple Dagger app. So that makes everything your CI does portable, including running your tests. |
Then there is the deployment of our DAGs. There is even more that we need to move over to Dagger. An example right now - if people have access to the repo, they will see that we use Go Releaser to build the Go binaries... So Go Releaser is nice, because it can do one thing simply and well, but there are certain things ... |
**Solomon Hykes:** And in that case we'll keep using Go Releaser; we'll just wrap it in a Dagger configuration that calls Go Releaser and other things. It's just that if you only call Go Releaser for everything, then there's no point in having the overhead of Dagger. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That is really cool. Always the first test of a successful tool/utility product does that thing itself. And if it does - great, because you're the first one(s) to realize what isn't working. And it is in your best interest to fix it for you first and foremost, and then for everyone else. Of course. So... |
I'm glad that you mentioned the repository, Sam, because I know Dagger is still in a closed beta. So if someone wanted to start using Dagger today, how would they do that? |
**Solomon Hykes:** Go to dagger.io, click Request Access, there's a short form... If you have a use case in mind, even if you're not sure, we ask extra questions about that. We love learning about use cases, hypothetical or real... And then we send the access relatively quickly. We're not actively hunting for people to... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes, I like that. And knowing a bit more about the story behind Docker's success and how challenging that was for the team, I think that this - at least in my mind - is one of the learning that you took away from that. So rather than making it wildly popular, everybody using it getting so much feedbac... |
**Solomon Hykes:** We actually did the same with Docker... It didn't last as long. No, you're right that we -- yeah, yes and no, because with Docker we did focus a lot on giving early access to people, even before it worked properly. Even before it built. The first meetings we had privately you couldn't compile yet and... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[laughs\] It's crazy. |
**Solomon Hykes:** Yeah. We had little private meetups at our office - back when you did things in offices - before launching. People would come and talk about Docker, how they would use it... But what's different is that ended pretty quickly; it lasted a couple months, then boom, it was out... And we did feel like we ... |
\[44:11\] So Docker was very successful. It happened for a good reason, but we did pay a price in terms of preparedness, and especially on the business side, because we didn't have a plan for monetizing it, and we didn't really think it through, and then we had to think it through in a very different environment, where... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** "I'm just gonna uninstall it!" \[laughs\] No, that's not how it happened for me, but I know exactly what you mean... So I'm glad that this is one of the things that you're doing differently. It makes a lot of sense. I think it sets up Dagger for success. One other takeaway from what you've just said, ... |
**Solomon Hykes:** Just a few! |
**Gerhard Lazu:** It will always be the case. Yeah, just a few. \[laughs\] Right. We're downplaying it. And I see this different approach in Dagger, and I think - again, without the benefit of hindsight of Docker, is - I can see it working. I really can see it working. I know that the community is very important. It's ... |
**Sam Alba:** Well, for me the community in a project like Dagger should be seen as an extension of the internal team. On some projects you have some code that is open source, and contributions externally that are managed on the side as a side thing, side task. For us, we try to reapply what we did at Docker, and for t... |
Same thing for internal discussions - we have a Discord channel with public channels, and we try to discuss everything related to development on public channels. We avoid side conversations internally, and we don't use Zoom. We use Discord and public channels for that. It's very important to involve everyone. That's wh... |
I think without this aspect, you cannot build an ecosystem, really. You cannot really involve people and have external contributors feeling important to the project. It's not something that you can fake, basically. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I see it exactly the way you see it. I completely agree with everything that you've mentioned... So I'm wondering now, how can the community help you best? The mission is great, the idea is great, the way you're approaching the community is great... So how can the community reciprocate? |
**Solomon Hykes:** \[48:20\] We have a strong opinion on open source contribution. I think it's misunderstood a lot, what open source contributors are relative to a project and product attached to it. I think when you participate in an open source project and you contribute to the code and the documentation or open an ... |
But the word "user" is super-important, because what got you there is using the product, and liking it enough to use it more and become proficient in even how it works... And also, there's something that you disliked enough about it, or that was missing, that motivated you to contribute - maybe the code itself, maybe j... |
So basically, everything Sam said just before - either you build around a community of people like that, or you don't. Either you want it to be possible or you don't. With Docker, that worked really well, so we're doing it again. So that's indirectly answering your question, which is "How do you best contribute?" Just ... |
That's our biggest test... There was a period at Docker when there was a lot of noise. I mean, it's still -- unfortunately, it's still kind of sticking in the history of Docker that at some point there was conflict with the community. We refused pull requests, and we argued with -- and you know, not a single time did t... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Focus is key, in everything, and knowing which are the things that you don't want to do is in my opinion more important than what you want to do. So from the perspective of focus, what are the things that you're focusing on? We've mentioned all the things that you would like to do, but you don't have ... |
**Solomon Hykes:** \[51:56\] Well, we can tell you what our internal priorities are, and hopefully they align with the answer... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** If you want... Yeah, I would love to do that. And I'm sure all our listeners would love to hear that. Yes, please. |
**Solomon Hykes:** So we have a weekly team meeting and we talk about how everyone's doing, and what everyone's doing, whether they're stuck and need help etc. and then how everyone's work contributes to our priorities as a team, and then we update those as we go. |
Right now we have a few priorities... One is a strong and engaged core community. So we need a core group of people that consider themselves Dagger developers, and they're actively contributing to the Dagger ecosystem. It's a very small one. So the number of those people is not important. 5 to 10 people that are contin... |
The second is successful (we call them) accounts. Actual projects, actually doing something real with Dagger, being happy and continuing to do it. So we have lots of data, lots of people interacting with us, trying -- we have some analytics... So we see activity, but activity doesn't necessarily mean a successful proje... |
And that there already is a cloud product with a great conversion and great retention, so something we can actually sell. So that's the third priority. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I'm thinking of helping you with the second point, in that I do see the Changelog setup using Dagger. I really wanna try it out. I also think that I could help you with the first one, but time and priorities, as you've just mentioned - we all have them... So it's subject to that. And I also know that ... |
**Solomon Hykes:** Yes. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So which is the ideal candidate that you would like to apply for those very, very few roles? |
**Sam Alba:** Well, I think it's a tough question, because everyone is different, so we don't have a type of people that we can describe really well in a blob of text. That said, there is this blob of text that was tweeted a few weeks ago that explains it as much as we can... And right now, we are looking to build a sm... |
**Solomon Hykes:** Great company. |
**Sam Alba:** And so, I'd be the first ten people, and I was part of them, actually. I was the first engineer hired at dotCloud back then, along with a few other people... And we were involved not just in building the product, but also in building the company, setting the culture for the next ten after us. So this is w... |
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