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Docker Is Weird

https://codeandcake.dev/posts/2026-10-22-docker-is-weird
37•psxuaw•1h ago

Comments

shykes•38m ago
Hi, I'm the creator of Docker and came across this post. It's always fun to see other engineers think about how you designed a system. I haven't been involved in developing Docker in many years, but it's a fun trip down memory lane.

I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.

irishcoffee•30m ago
Oh wow, hi! I think my biggest “gripe” with docker is that everyone grabs it as a hammer and views many problems as a nail. Am I way off base with that? What was your original vision for how docker might be used in the wild?
skinfaxi•30m ago
Given how things have changed since your creation and the way things are going, are there any things you would have done differently?
gradus_ad•30m ago
General question. When you were designing Docker, did you anticipate the success it would achieve?
shykes•19m ago
To give a sense of time: Docker launched in 2013, but it was one of many iterations of the same project, which I had been working on continuously since 2008. Over those 5 years, virtually nobody cared or understood what the hell I was working on. I lived in France and had no connection to the tech industry.

So, not only did I not anticipate this kind of success, I did not even have a reference frame for what success might even look like. All I knew was, I had an itch that I had to scratch, and I had nothing better to do :)

Waterluvian•13m ago
Was it always called Docker? Do you think the branding played a larger role in success than you would have expected?
layer8•22m ago
If you were implementing an operating system (free from compatibility concerns), what would you do differently to better support lightweight containers?
figmert•22m ago
I'm curious what made think of it in the first place? What was your thought process that made you think that these Linux primitives give the opportunity to make it a platform for distributing and deploying packaged applications and eliminating a lot of the issue around "it works my machine" argument?

You may have already answered this somewhere, so feel free to tell me what to search for or if you have a link to hand, that works too :)

okanat•19m ago
Would you consider writing Docker/moby in a different language, if you were to create it scratch today?
shykes•13m ago
Oh gosh, the choice of language is such a context-specific design decision. The first versions of what became Docker were written in Python. The choice of Go was a mix of nerdy excitement ("it's like the best of Python and C!"), and adoption strategy: back then devops tools were segmented by language runtime: ruby, python or Java mostly. Shipping a compiled binary allowed us to be adopted by all tribes.

None of these things can be transposed today, so I guess I can't answer...

For what it's worth, my current project (dagger) is written in Go.

Tenemo•8m ago
Do you think e.g. students learning docker syntax at a uni is beneficial in 2026 or you think LLM-assisted programming means that Docker will become an abstraction under an abstraction and its setup will be mostly automated by LLMs? I find myself very rarely debugging or handwriting dockerfiles nowadays!
davnicwil•4m ago
I'm a big fan of docker and mainly just want to say thanks for bringing it about.

I remember my first time trying to use a container was about 2015 on a beach cafe's wifi in Bocas del Toro, Panama. You can imagine how it went...

After a brief hiatus though I was back to it and since then it's been a core part of many a local dev stack and even production setup (compose) I've set up. I recall the magic moment for me being when I first realised you could mount src to use all your local native dev tools while completely virtualising everything else, including and especially whatever combo of runtimes and dependencies you need.

It was just a lightbulb moment, like it entirely solves 'works on my machine', setting new people up on a project, it just seems like how software engineering ought to work and once you have experienced it it's difficult to go back.

I'm curious, as its creator are you still using it, or as someone who can clearly look ahead to experimental ways of doing things are you on to the next thing whatever that may be? If so, what is it? :-)

suprjami•31m ago
Always nice to see someone demystifying a complex thing by learning the building blocks it's made from.

Knowing this, you might find rootless Podman's fork-exec method of starting containers to be more sensible. I certainly do. No root, no daemon, no socket.

If you want to learn more about the Linux Kernel namespaces which work together to make a container, this LWN series is really good: https://lwn.net/Articles/531114/

QGQBGdeZREunxLe•27m ago
A good talk on the tech behind containers.

Containers From Scratch • Liz Rice • GOTO 2018

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fi7uSYlOdc

tyingq•24m ago
Poke around in bocker[1]. For technical people, it makes the same points the article makes in a way that's very clear.

[1] "Docker implemented in around 100 lines of bash" https://github.com/p8952/bocker

gzapp•9m ago
That part about the threading was a huge source of issues back in the early days. Goroutines could hop threads and it's the threads namespace/cgroup configuration that gets inherited when forking..

One of the gnarliest issues I recall was where network namespaces could occasionally not be cleaned up correctly. So "randomly" (but more likely under certain loads) the networking of a reused thread would get jacked and Docker could no longer pull images.

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