• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Dion Almaer

Software, Development, Products

  • @dalmaer
  • LinkedIn
  • Medium
  • RSS
  • Show Search
Hide Search

Standardized containers are great, but I am most excited about the innovation in the ships!

January 20, 2015 Leave a Comment


Standardization. We are seeing another go-around thanks to the enthusiasm around Docker: An open platform for distributed applications for developers and sysadmins.

Having various parties come together to look at an open view of services at this layer of abstraction is great news for developers and operators. The black box effect of having a container of stuff with a declarative way of defining how to connect it into the ship is only a Good Thing.

I wonder if we are getting a little giddy and proud of ourselves prematurely though.

We Have Been Here Before

I believe that we have seen this pattern in the past. I remember an experience that parallels this in some ways, and that is when we got Servlets and EJBs in the Java ecosystem. Before that time there were various Java servers with competing APIs and features. You would have to choose between various application servers and write to their specifications. You were pretty much locked in. There were some work arounds, and a few people would separate their logic into the world of (what would later be called) POJOs and have adapters that plugged them in. Most didn’t.

Then Jason Hunter and friends put together Servlets and we had a standard way to declare how a component as described in a piece of code would talk to its container, and the container could then take the abstract and make it physical. For example, your code would talk to “TheProductDatabase” and in XML land you would map that to the actual Oracle Database you were using behind the scenes. The standard and the container helped make that happen (along with other abstractions such as JDBC in this case).

All seemed hunky dory. Many would build large scale enterprise systems in this manner. However, did you notice that there was a promise of shared components that never really materialized? Did you notice that most people didn’t migrate between multiple application servers that often?

Having the container standardized is fantastic, but it turns out that the ship that is transporting it still really matters. Companies such as WebLogic grew and then helped BEA grow as their ship was superior. WebSphere was known as “WebFear” yet over time enough was built on top of it (e.g. portal servers) that it wasn’t about deploying to WebSphere and was more about buying the solutions.

TheServerSide.com

I was able to run a unique experiment back then. The business development team had a great idea to bring in a few bucs by showing how EJB could work across different application servers at the same time!

This lead to “TSS Announces Portability Re-Launch on WebLogic and Oracle9iAS”. What wasn’t talked about so much was the pain in making it work, and how to do so we made choices you wouldn’t really make in the real world.

To run on more than one system we went to the bare minimum. We hid a lot through sharing info at the Tangosol Coherence layer which either side could grab. This meant that we used “Bean Managed Persistence” at the entity layer. You probably didn’t have to work in the world of EJB (it proved to be a flop and overly complex for no reason other than politics) and you are happier for it. The main lesson from it all was that even with a fairly simple plugin model, getting something non-trivial working across the worlds had more side effects that you would guess.

I see that again with the world of Docker. We were in the world where Amazon was the gorilla, with very special purpose APIs for the cloud. If you couple to their systems then you are just that… coupled. As per usual, if you aren’t in the #1 spot as a vendor the answer is to standardize, and the most vocal effort is OpenStack (even though it is constantly maligned). The other approach is “if you can’t beat them, join them”, which is the path that Eucalyptus took.

A modern full stack has a ton of pieces to it these days. There are multiple front ends (mobile, Web, email, SMS, watches!) talking to backends with special systems for machine learning, search, messaging, analytics, and data stores. You have the benefit of “the cloud” which in some ways is amazing, but back at TheServerSide I was able to run the entire thing no problem on a few servers for failover. I look back very fondly to the simplicity of those times.

As Docker kicks in it enables more ships to be built with more competition. Choosing the best ship is key, as in the world of production you need to answer a lot of questions such as:

  • How do I keep on top of my various services?
  • What is the health of my service? (where service isn’t just a container)
  • How is my overall system doing?
  • Where are the bad apples and can I weed them out?
  • What is my solution for fault tolerance and scalable performance?
  • How do I auto-scale for performance and also cost?

I am happy to see those standard containers, but I really can’t wait to see the new ships that will be built, all with gadgets to help engineers deliver fantastic experiences to their customers.

I hope that some of the best technology wins this time. It rarely seems too, but the optimist in me wants to see it happen this time!

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Twitter

My Tweets

Recent Posts

  • Generative AI: It’s Time to Get Into First Gear
  • Developer Docs + GenAI = ❤️
  • We keep confusing efficacy for effectiveness
  • The holy grail of a Web SDK
  • The rise of the extensible app platforms

Follow

  • LinkedIn
  • Medium
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Tags

3d Touch 2016 Active Recall Adaptive Design Agile Amazon Echo Android Android Development Apple Application Apps Artificial Intelligence Autocorrect blog Bots Brain Calendar Career Advice Cloud Computing Coding Cognitive Bias Commerce Communication Companies Conference Consciousness Cooking Cricket Cross Platform Deadline Delivery Design Desktop Developer Advocacy Developer Experience Developer Platform Developer Productivity Developer Relations Developers Developer Tools Development Distributed Teams Documentation DX Ecosystem Education Energy Engineering Engineering Mangement Entrepreneurship Exercise Family Fitness Founders Future GenAI Gender Equality Google Google Developer Google IO Habits Health HR JavaScript Jobs Jquery Kids Stories Kotlin Language Leadership Learning Lottery Machine Learning Management Messaging Metrics Micro Learning Microservices Microsoft Mobile Mobile App Development Mobile Apps Mobile Web Moving On NPM Open Source Organization Organization Design Pair Programming Paren Parenting Path Performance Platform Platform Thinking Politics Product Design Product Development Productivity Product Management Product Metrics Programming Progress Progressive Enhancement Progressive Web App Project Management Psychology Push Notifications pwa QA Rails React Reactive Remix Remote Working Resilience Ruby on Rails Screentime Self Improvement Service Worker Sharing Economy Shipping Shopify Short Story Silicon Valley Slack Software Software Development Spaced Repetition Speaking Startup Steve Jobs Study Teaching Team Building Tech Tech Ecosystems Technical Writing Technology Tools Transportation TV Series Twitter Typescript Uber UI Unknown User Experience User Testing UX vitals Voice Walmart Web Web Components Web Development Web Extensions Web Frameworks Web Performance Web Platform WWDC Yarn

Subscribe via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Archives

  • January 2023
  • September 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • November 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • October 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • January 2019
  • October 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • May 2018
  • February 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012

Search

Subscribe

RSS feed RSS - Posts

The right thing to do, is the right thing to do.

The right thing to do, is the right thing to do.

Dion Almaer

Copyright © 2023 · Log in