The Best Slide of DockerCon 2015
I had the privilege of attending DockerCon this year in San Francisco, and immensely enjoyed the stunning quality of the talks, meeting many of the people who work on Docker and it’s ecosystem, as well as getting to meet Solomon Hykes himself. There are many technical aspects that I am looking forward to getting to use and hack on, but my favorite slide from the entire conference has little to do with the exciting announcements or press releases.
Almost 7 months ago, just days before DockerCon EU 2014, the CoreOS team announced a competing standard to Docker. The timing of this didn’t seem to be aimed at building friendship, and indeed seemed to have just the opposite effect. There were public statements made back and forth by both sides in blog posts, twitter, and other forums, and the net effect just seemed to be confusion: confusion if CoreOS would continue to keep Docker as a first-class citizen, confusion about vendor lock-in, and confusion about the direction of Docker.
As both a Docker and CoreOS user, it was uncomfortable to see a turf war starting over container standards. Historically, companies that offer competing products almost never play nice and examples of this are not hard to find. While Steve Jobs is know for being a strong leader and building a large company, he is certainly not known for being nice to competitors. It took two and half years after his death for Microsoft Office to come to the iPad.
Near the end of the opening keynote, Solomon announced the Open Container Project as collaborative effort of at least 20 organizations, including CoreOS and Docker. This was very encouraging to hear, and just after all the fanfare and official announcement, Solomon switched to more personal tone.
“There’s one thing in particular that I like, and that is to build cool stuff for developers. And there’s one thing in particular that I really don’t like, and its to argue for no reason over bikeshedding details like the size and shape of the box, and who gets to decide what the size of the box is. And in the industry, we call that standard wars … Our industry has been through standard wars before, and I think for a little while it wasn’t clear to many of us if that was going to happen for us, for this industry, for this moment. I’m excited, I’m happy because I think today it’s pretty clear that its not going to happen… and that is a good thing! There is one person in particular that is responsible for that to a large degree, and I want to thank that person today for being open-minded enough and forward thinking enough to help us unite the industry and set everything on the right path. That person is Alex Polvi from CoreOS. Alex is in the house (applause), right here, a big round of applause for Alex.” — Solomon Hykes
It takes humility to make amends with someone who has publicly differentiated themselves from you, and to credit Alex with uniting an industry shows a lot of courage. This gives me a lot of faith in both Docker and CoreOS: faith in their products, the companies’ directions, and in their leadership. I got to meet Solomon near the end of the conference, and I thanked him for putting that slide in and making a statement. His response was true to form, “Now we can get back to building cool stuff!”
