It's interesting to contrast with Docker, who similarly pitched an exciting new development model & ecosystem. In Docker's case, it was indeed non-proprietary, built on existing standards, and has now got to the stage where you can now swap Docker out for competing alternatives to avoid lock-in entirely.
On the other hand, while that model went great for Docker the technology, it has not gone well for Docker the business. I imagine Dark might see Docker as a cautionary tale of why _not_ to go down that road.
The problem for Docker wasn't that per say, Docker itself was the free part that got everyone interested it's just that their paid for tier went head to head with Kubernetes and lost.
Had Kubernetes not existed they would be doing just fine economically as they would be the dominant platform.
Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat on OpenShift so I'm biased, but this is just my opinion.
Yep I agree. I recently helped a customer to move from Docker EE to OpenShift. They were frank about the pain points they experienced and why they were moving. It really came down to competition. K8s solves the problems they were having in a better way. Now with so much momentum behind K8s, nearly everybody is re-platforming their offerings on top of K8s.
Honest question as an outsider: What did Docker introduce that wasn't better addressed by other technologies? E.g. wasn't reproducibility the main point and already properly solved by nix?
Dockerfiles are far simpler than the Nix language. Likewise, sure, FreeBSD had jails first (and for a long time!), but they are more difficult to set up.
Docker allowed reproducibility to be accomplished by a person who likes the idea of it, but will shelve it if it doesn't work within an evening. This describes me, for example. I think it took off for that reason.
IMHO, it was the whole package: One tool that could configure and wrangle all the various kernel namespaces in order to make containers work.
They also benefited significantly from the splash they made and the tech excitement factor. I still run into people in my consulting work that are fairly new to containers, but brand recognition on Docker is through the roof. Everybody has heard of them even if they don't know what it can do for them.
Even prior to k8s, Red Hat and Cloud Foundry (amongst others) were pitching better container orchestration tooling that Docker offered (e.g. OpenShift 1 wasn't based on k8s).
On the other hand, while that model went great for Docker the technology, it has not gone well for Docker the business. I imagine Dark might see Docker as a cautionary tale of why _not_ to go down that road.