Why did containers happen? A view from ten years in the trenches by Docker's former CTO Justin Cormack
14 points by Mordo
14 points by Mordo
The talk can be found here.
The talk was excellent. I liked the part in the middle where Justin was describing how Docker separated configuration and implementation, and how that enabled them to promote immutable implementations, and how that let DockerHub get widely adopted. Not something that is immediately obvious because today we take it for granted.
And Justin also calls out how Nix is the go-to solution for dev environments. But I think Justin is wrong in his implicit (gentle) criticism that two decades of Nix trying to do build reproducibility is hard ... and therefore Nix is not widely adopted. I personally think Nix is not widely adopted because the audience for Nix has been Linux users, and Linux development environments are a small audience. (I am biased because I'm making a Windows-friendly system somewhat similar to Nix).