My (very brief!) presentation at Interzone.io on March 11, 2015. A more in depth exploration of these ideas can be found at http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/docker-and-the-future-of-containers-in-production video: https://www.joyent.com/developers/videos/docker-and-the-future-of-containers-in-production

1. The DIY Punk Rock
DevOps Playbook
CTO
bryan@joyent.com
Bryan Cantrill
@bcantrill

2. 1990s/2000s: Architectural big album rock
• The late 1990s saw the rise of three-tier architectures consisting
of presentation, application logic and data tiers
• Many names for roughly the same notion: “Service-oriented
architecture”, “Model/View/Controller”, etc.
• The AJAX+REST revolution of the mid-2000s gave rise to true
web applications in which application logic could live on the edge
• Led to a punk uprising...

3. Post-AJAX punks
• Why should HTTP be restricted to the web?
• Why should REST be restricted to web apps?
• Why should JavaScript be restricted to the client?
• Instead of having one monolithic architecture, why not have a
series of (smaller) services that merely did one thing well?
• In case this sounds vaguely familiar...

4. Proto-punk: The Unix philosophy
• The Unix philosophy, as articulated by Doug McIlroy:
• Write programs that do one thing and do it well
• Write programs to work together
• Write programs that handle text streams, because that is a
universal interface
• The single most important revolution in software systems thinking!
• Applying it to HTTP-based services...

5. Punk architecture: Microservices
• Microservices do one thing, and strive to do it well
• Replace a small number of monoliths with many services that
have well-documented, small HTTP-based APIs
• Larger systems can be composed of these smaller services
• And there is an organizational analogue: microservices can break
large organizations into smaller, more effective ones

6. Punks in prod: Deploying microservices
• Microservices are tautologically small
• One physical machine per service is clearly uneconomical…
• ...but deploying many orthogonal services on a single machine is
a well-known operational nightmare (e.g. conflicting
dependencies, shared fault domain)
• The key is to virtualize — but at what layer of the stack?
• Virtualization has ramifications with respect to performance and
density — which is to say, economics

7. Hardware-level virtualization?
• The historical answer to virtualization — since the 1960s — has
been to virtualize the hardware:
• A virtual machine is presented upon which each tenant runs an
operating system that they choose (and must manage)
• There are as many operating systems on a machine as tenants!
• Can run entire legacy stacks unmodified...
• ...but operating systems are heavy and don’t play well with others
with respect to resources like DRAM, CPU, I/O devices, etc.
• With microservices, overhead dominates!

8. Platform-level virtualization?
• Virtualizing at the application platform layer addresses the
tenancy challenges of hardware virtualization, and presents a
much more nimble (& developer friendly!) abstraction...
• ...but at the cost of dictating abstraction to the developer
• This is the “Google App Engine” problem: developers are in a
straightjacket where toy programs are easy — but sophisticated
applications are impossible
• Virtualizing at the application platform layer poses many other
challenges with respect to security, containment, etc.

9. OS-level virtualization!
• Virtualizing at the operating system hits a sweet spot:
• A single operating system (i.e. a single kernel) allows for efficient use of
hardware resources, maximizing tenancy and performance
• Disjoint instances are securely compartmentalized by the operating system
• Gives tenants what appears to be a virtual machine (albeit a very fast one)
on which to run higher-level software: PaaS ease with IaaS generality
• Also: boots like a bandit!
• Model was pioneered by FreeBSD jails and taken to their logical
extreme by Solaris zones — and then aped by Linux containers

10. OS-level virtualization at Joyent
• Joyent runs OS containers in the cloud via SmartOS — and we
have run containers in multi-tenant production since ~2006
• Adding support for hardware-based virtualization circa 2011
strengthened our resolve with respect to OS-based virtualization
• This is especially true for microservices: as services get small,
overhead and latency become increasingly important — and OS
containers become a bigger and bigger win
• We emphasized their operational characteristics — performance,
elasticity, tenancy — and for many years, we were a lone voice...

11. Containers as PaaS foundation?
• Some saw the power of OS containers to facilitate up-stack
platform-as-a-service abstractions
• For example, dotCloud — a platform-as-a-service provider — built
their PaaS on OS containers
• Struggling as a PaaS, dotCloud pivoted — and open sourced
their container-based orchestration layer...

12. ...and Docker was born

13. Docker revolution
• Docker has used the rapid provisioning + shared underlying
filesystem of containers to allow developers to think operationally
• Developers can encode deployment procedures via an image
• Images can be reliably and reproducibly deployed as a container
• Images can be quickly deployed — and re-deployed
• Docker complements the DIY ethos of microservices
• Docker will do to apt what apt did to tar

14. Broader container revolution
• The Docker model has pointed to the future of containers
• Docker’s challenges today are largely operational: network
virtualization, persistence, security, etc.
• Security concerns are not due to Docker per se, but rather to the
architectural limitations of the Linux “container” substrate
• For multi-tenancy, state-of-the-art for Docker containers is to run
in hardware virtual machines (!!)
• Deploying OS containers in hardware virtual machines
negates their economic advantage!

15. The future of containers in production?
• Can we achieve an ideal world that combines the development
model of Docker with the deployment model of SmartOS?
• To facilitate this ideal, we at Joyent have:
• Added the ability to run Linux binaries in a SmartOS container
• Added a Docker API end point to SmartDataCenter, the
container-native stack that runs our public cloud
• Open sourced everything
• Here’s to the punk rock revolution of microservices + containers!