Not living dangerously
Dec. 20th, 2013 11:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hirezDocker's a bit bleeding edge, isn't it.
Mind, the name itself brings to mind a sort of Manly and Intransigent fetish club experience with which I am entirely unfamiliar.
LXC isn't much better, either. Still, once you've got your head around FreeBSD Jails, all of this Linux gubbins is a bit vieux chapeau.
Mind, the name itself brings to mind a sort of Manly and Intransigent fetish club experience with which I am entirely unfamiliar.
LXC isn't much better, either. Still, once you've got your head around FreeBSD Jails, all of this Linux gubbins is a bit vieux chapeau.
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no subject
Date: 2013-12-21 03:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-21 10:57 am (UTC)Meanwhile, servers have stopped getting faster and are now just getting denser. This is handily co-incidental with the majority of jobs that people want doing turning out to be looking at pictures of cats on the internet. You don't need much CPU grunt to do that per cat, but for loads and loads of cats and perhaps some fainting goats, loads of computers all at once is much more convenient.
In the old days (six-eight years ago for those who're not FaceGoogleSoft) you could get away with piling a whole set of things on the one whizzy server - serving cat pictures, sending mail about new cat pictures you might like to look at, generating graphs of who was looking at which cat picture - but you'd get to the state where your whizzy server was only earning its keep on Thursday or Friday afternoons (Or, if you ran a gaming-related system, peak utilisation would be when the mob of little scrotes piled off the school bus and into their bedrooms to continue their sweary arguments) and the rest of the time was just ticking over, guzzling amps and rack-space and running a set of cooling fans hard enough to hear three streets away.
So through the magic of decent hardware and stealing forty-year-old ideas from the mainframe types, we ended up being able to split up one real server into a number of pretend ones. From the inside of the pretend box, it looks like a real one. From the outside - hey, we've got twenty middling servers for the price of one! Profit!
This means that you/we can serve cat pictures much more efficiently, so much so in fact that there's scope for side businesses serving a standalone fainting goat site and one that's all about Sherlock Holmes fandom.
Crazy times!
However, because you've got lots of wee pretend boxes all doing (in theory) one thing well (or very much not, depending on the state of your developers...) your system diagrams get a bit big and complicated and trying to debug the things at 3AM on a rainy Wednesday is more than (this) flesh and blood can stand.
So we need to be able to spin up a complete replica of the 'live' site to be able to hack on it. With full-on pretend hardware, this still takes a bit of time. Unless you're seriously VC-backed and can afford to keep two of everything lying around. (Yes, I know, AWS, Instagram, etc. Greenfield startups who've built scaling in from back-of-envelope-in-coffee-shop days are a special case. The rest of us muddle along.)
LXC is a thing that really blurs the edges when it comes to pretend hardware. In fact it mostly doesn't even pretend and just sticks a fake beard on and is all like 'No really I am totally Santa Claus and that elf did not call your child a wee monster'
Docker takes LXC and gives it a fixed-gear bicycle and an ironic metal t-shirt.
I hope that is somewhat less confusing.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-21 05:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-22 08:42 pm (UTC)Brand new! Stable for 21 days! Written in Go! Cool 'io' URL! Buzzword compliant!
The thought-bubble above the PHB must be "If I don't use this, the internet *will* remember me as the guy who didn't sign the Beatles!".
no subject
Date: 2013-12-22 08:56 pm (UTC)