It's an exciting time in the infrastructure orchestration/automation space. The technologies are moving fast, but here are the interesting things we've observed in the past week:
Docker & Rocket Controversy
Docker has moving ahead extending their platform with tools such as:
- Docker Machine - Basically configuration management (CM) for Machines
- Docker Swarm - Basically a coordination protocol between Docker daemons
- Docker Compose - Basically a CM focused just on Docker apps
The technologies involved aren't new, but it seems that they are focused on streamlining and constraining the tool focus to be solely on their own platform. After all, we have plenty of tools that already configure machines, and plenty of tools that can deploy docker containers, but since they are older than Docker, they can do other things as well.
However this has led some like CoreOS to argue that Docker is doing too much outside of just container technology. CoreOS is therefore making their own container specification called Rocket. They are planning some improvements that are being ignored by Docker.
However all of this led to a bit of an online "debate" between CoreOS and Docker. You read the arguments here:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8682525
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8699957
- http://3ofcoins.net/2014/12/06/of-containers-dockers-rockets-and-daemons/
From Matrix AI's perspective, we would love to have a standardised container specification, as long as all the popular implementations actually implement the spec.
Datacenter Operating System
Mesosphere is arguing for a datacenter operating system. We of course agree.
Although our first focus will be the cloud, our vision sees Internet of Things (IoT) as the real cloud in the future.
Atlas by Hashicorp
Hashicorp (makers of Vagrant) has release Atlas (https://atlas.hashicorp.com/). Atlas ties in all of their separate products (Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, Serf/Consul) to produce a continuous software delivery pipeline. Check out their awesome diagram where they compare how software is delivered currently to delivering software with Atlas:
Atlas has very similar ideas to Matrix Forge. We intend to reuse much of Atlas technology in our Forge phase but adapt it to work in our functional reactive infrastructure topology.