We understand it, but its really hard to explain briefly. So many people assume Docker==Linux Containers. Throw in virtual machines and start talking about running a Linux app in a Docker container in HyperV on Windows and it only really works with pictures. And that's before you talk about multiple containers running across a public cloud provider. Demos will help.
Ah okay thanks. The partnership sounds great and I know it's really freaking challenging but I hope in the future to see:
1. Native Mac OS X support (so Mac Apps can also be in containers)
2. Being able to mix container operating systems with other host operating systems.
If that ever happens then operating systems and their versions would pretty much no longer matter; you could run anything anywhere without compatibility issues. I feel like this is something that has to eventually happen no matter what I'm just always curious what form(s) it will take.
The use case for our startup is: we have lots of compute and graphics intensive services being created and tested on Macs by developers, targeted for Linux Docker instances in the cloud. It would be nice to be able to run these same containers natively on OS X rather than requiring developers to bring up a local hypervisor (e.g. VirtualBox) and a local virtual Linux instance). This would help with both dev and test. Additionally, sometimes our engineers would like to be able to run compute jobs locally and merge the results back into the cloud based system.
That sounds like a difficult proposition without your target being able to run Mac binaries.
Having some sort of translation that's not a VM as a part of the distribution mechanism doesn't make much sense, and breaking the portability of Docker comes at a significant cost.
I think you're interpreting his words too literally. Nothing that gets deployed to a QA/staging/production system should be built on a developer's workstation in the first place, those specific containers need to come off a build server. The binaries on the developer's workstation would be built on/for OS X, and the binaries in QA/staging/production on the (Linux) build server for (Linux) targets.
> Are there Mac servers out there you want to run apps on? Or just consumer apps you want to run on your mac? Curious about the use case!
Maybe they haven't but I feel like Apple has abandoned the Mac OS X Server so no apps at least for me in that case but I think consumer apps would be a pretty cool use case.
> VMs are that abstraction today. I think we can do better going forward, but still a lot to do with what we currently have planned.
I second the opinion regarding OSX servers; not only is Xserve long dead but the "server" component of OSX is an application that bundles mostly open source applications with a GUI, if I'm not mistaken?
This appears to be aimed at SOHO users and not racks and racks of servers in a data centre.
Is there a public roadmap for currently planned features? I know there was discussion to make Docker more community driven, but I'm not sure if that went anywhere?
There are no current goals to make Linux executables run natively in windows and vice versa.