Bringing clarity to containers

At the beginning of the year, I laid down a few predictions. While I refuse on principle to engage in Stephen O’Grady-style self-flagellation, I do think it’s worth revisiting the headliner prediction, namely that 2015 is the year of the container. I said at the time that it wasn’t particularly controversial, and I don’t think it’s controversial now: 2015 was the year of the container, and one need look no further than the explosion of container conferences with container camps and container summits and container cons.

My second prediction was marginally more subtle: that the impedence mismatch between containers in development and containers in production would be a wellspring of innovation. If anything, this understated the case: the wellspring turned out to be more like an open sluice, and 2015 saw the world flooded with multiple ways of doing seemingly everything when it comes to containers. That all of these technologies and frameworks are open source have served to accelerate them all, and mutations abound (Hypernetes, anyone?).

On the one hand this is great, as we all benefit by so many people exploring so many different ideas. But on the other hand, the flurry of choice can become a blizzard of confusion – especially when and where there is seemingly overlap between two technologies. (Or worse, when two overlapping and opinionated technologies disagree ardently on those opinions!) This slide from Karl Isenberg of Mesosphere at KubeCon last month captured it; the point is neither the specific technologies (as Karl noted, plenty are missing) and nor is it about the specific layers (many would likely quibble with some of the details of Karl’s taxonomy) but rather about the explosion of abstraction (and concomitant confusion) in this domain.

One of the biggest challenges that we have in containers heading into 2016 is that this confusion now presents significant head winds for early-adopters and second-movers alike. This has become so acute that I posed a question to KubeCon attendees: are we at or near Peak Confusion in the container space? The conclusion among everyone I spoke with (vendors, developers, operators and others) was that we’re nowhere near Peak Confusion – with many even saying that confusion is still accelerating. (!) Even for those of us who have been in containers for years, this has been a little terrifying – and I can imagine for those entirely new to containers, it’s downright paralyzing.

So, what’s to be done? I think much of the responsibility lies with the industry: instead of viewing containers as new territory for conquest, we must take it upon ourselves to assure for users an interoperable and composable future – one in which technologies can differentiate themselves based on the qualities of their implementation rather than the voraciousness of their appetite. Lest this sound utopian, it is this same ethos that underlies our modern internet, as facilitated by the essential work of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Thanks to the IETF and its ethos of “rough consensus and running code” we ended up with the interoperable internet. (Indeed, this text itself was brought to you by RFC 791, RFC 793, RFC 1034, and RFC 2616 – among many, many others.)

As for an entity that can potentially serve an IETF-like role for container-based computing, I look with guarded optimism to today’s lauch of the Cloud-native Computing Foundation. Joyent has been involved with the CNCF since its inception, and based on what we’ve seen so far, we see great promise for it in 2016 and beyond. We believe that by elucidating component boundaries and by fostering open source projects that share the values of interoperability and composability, the CNCF can combine the best attributes of both the IETF and the Apache Foundation: rough consensus and running, open source software that allows elastic, container-deployed, service-oriented infrastructure. If the CNCF can do this it will (we believe) serve a vital mission for practitioners: displace confusion with clarity – and therefore accelerate our collective cloud-native future!