World and Docker

Few critic words about docker, unicorns and butterflies.

Before Docker Conference in Barselona I got lovely trip to my friends in Malaga. I had nice evening dinner with this couple in beautiful place and very pleasant chat about everything and of course about work and business. Head of the family is man who actually led to success IT outsourcing company with more than 12000 employees. Still he is business person who use to work in IT but he operates in figures, products and real user needs and not so in low level technical terms. So when he ask me about where I’m going to and what docker is it was kind of difficult to answer cause few reasons.

First, it’s hard to explain how containers can actually improve your business. Second, it’s hard to explain how light virtualisation is different from small virtual machine and why we need such operation overhead in term of support, capable engineers and actually ecosystem overall.

In two days I have been in Barcelona and listen Salomon who described docker as disruption comparing it to Internet and other guys who made reference to “The Cathedral and the Bazzar”.

Next two days I heard many words about how amazing docker is and how many companies building solution on it and how tech world changed because of that. I saw many brilliant tech guys who really built usefull solution on top of it as @JohnFiedle. Some of them as Casey Bisson help me figure out how to deal with my current project using Joyent products (@joyent still rocks). Was only problem behind all of this. No real business value.

Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things.

And here where docker comunity fall hard. I have been on other tech conferences so I know that they shouldn’t be directly business oriented but most of time they don’t even trying to. Docker at the other hand created hype as Big Data trend did but with even less to offer. Useful tool become malignant without context of ecosystem.

For me swardley described perfectly place for docker as part of ecosystem and looks like many on the market agree with him.

Hype of docker and microservices will be strong some time when it finally settle down to useful component of PaaS or other complex system. Till then I will be enjoying what @hashicorp and @coreoslinux providing as ecosystem for me.

I know that many tech guru will be insist on disruptive nature of microservices and docker in particular but at the end final consumer simple don’t care about that. Business world is simple. Docker? What Docker?