Spoon or Dock?

We have been hearing about Docker and its rapid adoption by some large cloud service vendors. Docker is fast gaining adoption as an application virtualisation layer that focuses on the development environment rather system engineers like VMWare.

Speaking at the web bazaar's Reinvent conference in Las Vegas, Vogels was joined on stage by Ben Golub, CEO of Docker – which is supported by the new container service.

“Developers are largely stuck in the dark ages,” said Golub, arguing that programmers too often tie their applications too closely to infrastructure.

Docker CEO Brian Golub on stage at Amazon Reinvent

You can find out more about Docker on its Wiki page found here. Reading from main entry, it details that Docker is an application level virtualisation technology that relies on the Linux kernel. This Wiki entry explains that;

"Docker is an open-source project that automates the deployment of applications inside software containers, by providing an additional layer of abstraction and automation of operating system–level virtualization on Linux.[2] Docker uses resource isolation features of the Linux kernel such as cgroups and kernel namespaces to allow independent "containers" to run within a single Linux instance, avoiding the overhead of starting virtual machines."

That said, Docker is a Linux based system and it will be a while before Docker provides support for  Microsoft desktop or server platform.

If you need a cloud based "container" development platform for your Windows systems, you should have a look at Spoon. Spoon is a Seattle based company that has been around for years and was initially famous (infamous??) for virtualizing Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

In fact Spoon has provided a handy "Differences from Docker" that some of the significant differences between Spoon and Docker which include;

• Platform
• Layering
• Streaming
• Variable Isolation
• Networking
• Toolchain
• Configuration
• Support

Infoworld has provided some helpful differences between Spoon and Docker, which can be found here. 

It will be interesting to see how far Docker goes, and see if it can match the current levels of media hype.