On Fri, Mar 9, 2018 at 5:10 AM, Jari Arkko <jari.arkko@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
That was the result of containerized transport rather than a political cataclysm.IT companies tend to make the mistake that political circumstances are irrelevant to them. They are on the look out for emergent technologies.Governments were not. Not only did HMG not understand the impact of containerization and fail to plan for it, they entirely failed to realize the impact until a decade after it had occurred. The cost of shipping goods dropped by two orders of magnitude because of the box. That is why it is now possible to build cars in the UK using parts from Japan.Many policy makers have yet to catch up to the impact of containerization. They are cheerfully trying to rewrite the rules of the modern trading system while understanding exactly nothing about its workings.Containerization? For some reason your story brings to my mind some shifts in cloud computing and their ongoing effects in the industry :-)
I always suspected that the reason Docker chose the name 'Containerization' was an allusion to the impact of multi-mode containerized transport, aka the shipping container, aka the Box. Either it is a very happy coincidence or it is a deliberate and brilliant explanation of the benefits of the technology.
EKR mentioned the book on The Box on his blog, I recommended it to my colleagues at VeriSign. I don't know if I mentioned it to Ben Golub though.
Before the shipping container, cargos had to be loaded and unloaded piece by piece on each ship. Ships spent weeks in port and vast amounts of cargo was stolen. The shipping container meant that the cargo could be loaded and unloaded in hours and no 'shrinkage'.
Docker containers are almost the same concept. Instead of loading your entire application and O/S build onto each machine, you put it into a 'container'.
And the impact of Docker is likely to be very similar. The traditional way of running a data center meant that the administration staff were often the only people who understood the hardware/software interdependencies. Moving a service from one machine to another might take a week as the entire platform had to be built. Or you ended up standardizing your hardware platform down to the board revision so that you could image drives and guarantee that the services would work.
Containers do away with all that by introducing a standardized interface.
