Docker 0.7 Runs On All Linux Distributions 88
rjmarvin writes "Docker 0.7 was released today, with 7 major new features including support to run on all Linux distributions. No longer capable solely on running on Debian and Ubuntu Linux, Docker 0.7 adds support for distributions such as Red Hat, SUSE, Gentoo and Arch. From the announcement: 'A key feature of Docker is the ability to create many copies of the same base filesystem almost instantly. Under the hood Docker makes heavy use of AUFS by Junjiro R. Okajima as a copy-on-write storage mechanism. AUFS is an amazing piece of software and at this point it’s safe to say that it has safely copied billions of containers over the last few years, a great many of them in critical production environments. Unfortunately, AUFS is not part of the standard linux kernel and it’s unclear when it will be merged. This has prevented docker from being available on all Linux systems. Docker 0.7 solves this problem by introducing a storage driver API, and shipping with several drivers. Currently 3 drivers are available: AUFS, VFS (which uses simple directories and copy) and DEVICEMAPPER, developed in collaboration with Alex Larsson and the talented team at Red Hat, which uses an advanced variation of LVM snapshots to implement copy-on-write. An experimental BTRFS driver is also being developed, with even more coming soon: ZFS, Gluster, Ceph, etc. When the docker daemon is started it will automatically select a suitable driver depending on its capabilities.'"
Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Informative)
From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
Docker is an open source project that automates the deployment of applications inside software containers.
And then [wikipedia.org]:
Operating system-level virtualization is a server virtualization method where the kernel of an operating system allows for multiple isolated user-space instances, instead of just one. Such instances (often called containers, VEs, VPSs or jails) may look and feel like a real server, from the point of view of its owner.
On Unix-based systems, this technology can be thought of as an advanced implementation of the standard chroot mechanism. In addition to isolation mechanisms, the kernel often provides resource management features to limit the impact of one container's activities on the other containers.
So my takeaway is that each container would feel like a full virtual machine, but with only the overhead of separate user-spaces and without the overhead of loading an entire operating system into each. A neat approach, really.
Re:Awesome! (Score:2, Informative)
It's a jigsaw. It's a power drill. It's a wood-turning lathe. It's an asphalt spreader. It's 67 tools in one!
Re:Awesome! (Score:4, Informative)
Even after reading it, I've got no fucking idea what it does! Their "read more" page just shits out a whole load of buzzwords.
Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Informative)
Sure...done before. Evolution, not revolution. Very useful if you fit it's use case.
Re:Awesome! (Score:4, Informative)
Everyone knows what Linux and Java are on Slashdot. Clearly, most people don't know what Docker is.
Re:Why that name? (Score:4, Informative)
Except that a "dock" is already a common thing in computer UIs, whereas an Indian tribe and the name of a developer's kid's toy elephant are not. It's as if someone came out with a product called "mouseWM" that was neither a window manager nor accepted mouse input, but was actually a scripting language or something.