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On Thu, Jun 06, 2013 at 10:33:12AM -0700, Sam Alba wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I work for dotCloud and I wanted to share our recent work on Nova[1].
> We've been using LXC containers on our PaaS product for more than 2
> years now and we recently released the Docker project[2] that you may
> have heard about already.
> 
> We also wrote a blog post[3] to explain the work we did and how the
> Glance can make the glue between Nova and Docker's remote Images
> index.

Some people asked offlist what my opinion was on accepting this new
virt driver, given that we already have Libvirt LXC driver support
in Nova.

Superficially this appears to be the same scenario that was recently
raised wrt supporting a new OpenVZ driver in Nova, vs supporting it
via the Libvirt OpenVZ capabilities (where we chose the latter).

"LXC" can mean many things. In particular it can refer to the kernel
features that have been implemented to support containers on Linux
or it can refer to a specific userspace toolset implementation that
uses those kernel features. There is the Libvirt LXC driver or there
is the sf.net LXC toolset providing separate userspace implementations.
IIUC, Docker is an application that is built on top of the sf.net
LXC toolset. Conceptually it looks like it works at a higher level
than the raw LXC toolset, so cannot be considered to duplicate either
the Libvirt LXC / sf.net LXC toolset, but rather to complement them.

As such, I believe this is a different situation to the one that
recently arose wrt OpenVZ. A "Docker" driver for Nova would be
providing integration with different capability, than is provided
for by the Libvirt LXC driver. So I think there could be merit in
having Docker support in Nova, provided the submitter (or another
interested party) is prepared to commit to being an active maintainer
for the code long term, and not just submit it and expect someone
else to maintain it after merge.

Regards,
Daniel
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