Jérôme Petazzoni is giving a talk on "How Linux Containers and Docker will change how we develop and deploy apps." He took a few minutes to talk with a SCALE Team member about his talk.
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?
A: I joined dotCloud three years ago, moving from Paris to sunny California in the process. Building tools, and more generally helping my fellow developers, has always been one of my deepest passions; so being the first employee of a budding PAAS start-up was the dream job. I always tried to keep a balance between sysadmin (wait, don't we say "ops" now?) and developer skills, and this was also the perfect place for that, as doing ops "in the Cloud" involves a great deal of development. We believe strongly in the "devops" idea, and therefore, were constantly trying to automate ourselves out of our jobs!
Q: You're giving a talk on How Linux Containers and Docker will change how we develop and deploy apps. Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?
A: About ten years ago, Xen was out, and I ran virtual machines for the first time. The potential of virtualization (and specifically paravirtualization, which, back then, was the only way to get good levels of isolation and near-native performance) completely blew my mind, and reshaped the way I would manage servers forever. Today, containers are "changing everything, again". That sounds like a dull marketing mantra, but that doesn't prevent me from believing that containers (and tools like Docker) will lead a revolution similar to the one of Xen or VMWare back then. That's what I plan to demonstrate during my presentation!
Q: Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?
A: This is my second visit. I absolutely enjoyed SCALE 11X. My main concern with it was that I constantly had to make difficult decisions to pick where to go next, because there were so many exciting talks happening in parallel! A quick glance at this year's program convinced me that it wouldn't be any different. A good problem to have!
Q: Last year, you gave a talk at SCALE 11X about Linux Containers. What will be different in your talk this year?
A: One year ago, Docker hadn't been released; it was still a skunkworks project. During my talk, I hinted at the fact that we were looking for testers and developers to build with us a completely new tool to manage containers. That tool was Docker, and was released a few weeks later. My talk last year covered deep technical details about containers and their underlying mechanisms (like namespaces and cgroups). This year, we will focus less on how containers work, and more on what we can do with them (better development and deployment workflows).
Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
A: If people want to discuss Docker more in-depth, or if they want to learn about the topic but unfortunately can't make it to SCALE on Saturday, I would love to mention that there will be a Docker meet-up in Pasadena, Monday the 24th. I can't wait to be at SCALE, and meet all the awesome people who will be there!
[Interview by SCALE Team member Hannah Anderson.]