This is an interesting take, but it doesn't entirely make sense. Ierymenko's 'save your work' metaphor is a little misleading, since (I certainly hope) nobody is creating docker images manually. But I like his idea that dockerfile creation, by which you set up a stack in a way that's automatically reproducible, is equivalent to the role of a linker in a compiled program.
Where he loses me is when he suggests that Puppet et al are closer to a 'pure' linker. Configuration management systems are doing the same thing as a Dockerfile: instead of setting up your XYZ stack by hand, you write a Puppet manifest that calls the modules for XYZ and sets them up the way you need. Your final result isn't a server with the XYZ stack: it's an abstracted process that will reproduce your XYZ stack. The main difference is the implementation; Docker reproduces your stack in an isolated environment, and configuration management tools reproduce your stack on an arbitrary platform.
But nobody thinks of Docker as a configuration management tool, and for the most part I don't think people even think of Docker as a competitor to configuration management. Hell, Docker is a core component of many Puppet CI workflows.
So there's something else going on here. What's the secret sauce? Is Docker just two great things (config management + virtualization) glued together so cohesively that it becomes greater than the sum of its parts?
Where he loses me is when he suggests that Puppet et al are closer to a 'pure' linker. Configuration management systems are doing the same thing as a Dockerfile: instead of setting up your XYZ stack by hand, you write a Puppet manifest that calls the modules for XYZ and sets them up the way you need. Your final result isn't a server with the XYZ stack: it's an abstracted process that will reproduce your XYZ stack. The main difference is the implementation; Docker reproduces your stack in an isolated environment, and configuration management tools reproduce your stack on an arbitrary platform.
But nobody thinks of Docker as a configuration management tool, and for the most part I don't think people even think of Docker as a competitor to configuration management. Hell, Docker is a core component of many Puppet CI workflows.
So there's something else going on here. What's the secret sauce? Is Docker just two great things (config management + virtualization) glued together so cohesively that it becomes greater than the sum of its parts?