Where is Docker headed?


I am heading to Copenhagen this week to attend DockerCon Europe 2017 you can still register for the conferencehere. Because we created Rancher to serve the market needs resulting from the widespread adoption of Docker technology, we have maintained a strong presence at every DockerCon conference over the last three years.

DockerCon is special—not only is it a gathering place for major industry players, it is one of the few events that brings together far more users than vendors. The opportunity to meet so many users in one place makes attending and sponsoring the conference a worthwhile investment. Talking to our users and hearing their ideas motivates us to work harder and improve the Rancher product.

The Docker technology evolution is at a critical juncture, so I am particularly interested in what Docker, Inc. will announce at this year’s DockerCon EU. We recently announced the technical preview of Rancher 2.0, where we transitioned Rancher from a product built on Docker to a product built on Kubernetes. As much success as Docker has achieved as an application packaging and runtime standard, Kubernetes has overtaken Docker in terms of container infrastructure, orchestration, and ecosystem.

Container infrastructure

Infrastructure goes beyond packaging and runtime; it includes storage, networking, load balancing, and security. When we started Rancher three years ago, we expected Docker to define industry standard plugin interfaces for container networking and storage. Despite the excellent work done by Docker and other early pioneers like SocketPlane (later acquired by Docker), Weaveworks, and ClusterHQ as well as plenty of support from industry leaders such as Cisco, EMC, and NetApp, Docker interfaces like libnetwork, Container Network Model (CNM), and Docker volume plugin failed to become viable standards. We tried very hard to work with CNM and Docker volume plugins at Rancher, but we ran into insurmountable challenges:

  1. We never figured out how to make CNM work outside of Docker’s built-in networking implementation. We were not able to, for example, create our own implementation of CNM that worked without Swarm mode.
  2. We were unable to make the Rancher implementation of Docker volume plugin work reliably with the Docker daemon. I remember a particularly challenging issue, #18504, which caused the Docker daemon to lock up from time to time. We were not able to get this issue fixed, nor were we able to find a workaround.

We solved these problems in Rancher 1.2 (released December 2016) by switching to Kubernetes Container Network Interface (CNI) and Kubernetes Flexvolume storage framework. Since Rancher 2.0 builds on Kubernetes, any networking, storage, load balancer, and security solutions that integrate with Kubernetes now work with Rancher out of the box.

Container orchestration

We developed a container orchestrator for Rancher, called Cattle, to add a number of features missing from early Docker Swarm, including service discovery, DNS, service upgrade, and a load balancer. We hoped Cattle would eventually be superseded by Swarm as Swarm becomes more full featured.

When Rancher 1.0 was released in March 2016, however, Swarm was still not quite ready. At the time, Kubernetes was also still immature and the future of container orchestration was uncertain. Therefore, we decided that Rancher 1.0 should provide support for multiple orchestrators: Cattle, Swarm, Kubernetes, and Mesos. Our users loved the idea of being able to adopt one product without having to commit to a particular container orchestrator.

We were really excited in June 2016 when Docker announced Swarm Mode. Swarm Mode offered many features missing from early Docker Swarm and was much closer to what Cattle could do. We quickly added Swarm Mode support in Rancher.

By early 2017, however, it became apparent that Swarm Mode was not gaining traction. Perhaps early Swarm mode implementations had quality issues, or perhaps Kubernetes development was already too far ahead. A vast majority of Rancher users were selecting Cattle or Kubernetes.

Rancher 2.0 builds on the industry-standard Kubernetes orchestrator. Cattle is not gone—we will continue to develop it as it is now part of the integrated Rancher experience. With 2.0, we provide a simple Docker and Docker Compose user experience that builds on Kubernetes. Anyone with basic understanding of Docker can get started with Rancher quickly, and move to the more advanced native Kubernetes experience when they are ready to do so.

Container ecosystem

DockerCon Europe has an impressive list of sponsors, which are no doubt attracted by the ever-growing number of Docker users. I always look for the latest number of total pulls from DockerHub as a benchmark of Docker growth. At DockerCon Austin in April 2017, that number was 12 billion, and has no doubt grown since then.

The Kubernetes ecosystem consists of largely the same set of companies, but the engagement model is quite different. Most ecosystem partners like us view Docker as mature technology with a lot of users. The Kubernetes ecosystem is far more vibrant because that’s where active development, innovation, and integration is happening.

Where will Docker go?

I have no real insight on what Docker will announce this week. And that’s why I find I am really looking forward to attending this DockerCon. Will Docker announce something this week that motivates ecosystem partners to increase development efforts on Docker? Are they going to announce any new projects or initiatives?

Looking at the original containerd blog Solomon Hykes published in December of 2016, I noticed one particular figure:

containerd will use the OCI
standard](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uRMajP8gKwG3Qkv1XUEXFOzZ663iPBcOi0d8QXpJc_o/edit#)

In the new containerd world, Docker is positioned at the same level as OpenShift (and Rancher 2.0), at a layer even higher than Kubernetes. Perhaps there will be a new Docker built on Kubernetes? I can’t wait to find out.

Rancher at DockerCon

Please stop by our booth (G16) to say hello, get a demo of Rancher 2.0 and pick-up a coveted Rancher t-shirt. It would also be great to see you in one of our speaking sessions:

Kubernetes for Docker Users Speaker: Darren Shepherd When: Tuesday, 17 October from 16:35 – 16:55 Where: Ecosystem B – Auditorium 12

Using LinuxKit to Build Custom RancherOS Systems Speaker: Sven Dowideit When: Thursday, 19 October Where: Moby Summit

Sheng is a co-founder and CEO of Rancher Labs. Prior to starting Rancher, Sheng was CTO of the Cloud Platforms group at Citrix Systems after their acquisition of Cloud.com, where he was co-founder and CEO. Sheng has more than 15 years of experience building innovative technology. He was a co-founder at Teros, which was acquired by Citrix in 2005 and led large engineering teams at SEVEN Networks, and Openwave Systems. Sheng started his career as a Staff Engineer in Java Software at Sun Microsystems, where he designed the Java Native Interface (JNI) and led the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) development for the Java 2 platform. Sheng has a B.S. from the University of Science and Technology of China and a Ph.D. from Yale University.

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