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# The 5 principles of Standard Containers | ||
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Define a unit of software delivery called a Standard Container. | ||
The goal of a Standard Container is to encapsulate a software component and all its dependencies in a format that is self-describing and portable, so that any compliant runtime can run it without extra dependencies, regardless of the underlying machine and the contents of the container. | ||
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The specification for Standard Containers is straightforward. | ||
It mostly defines 1) a file format, 2) a set of standard operations, and 3) an execution environment. | ||
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A great analogy for this is the shipping container. | ||
Just like how Standard Containers are a fundamental unit of software delivery, shipping containers are a fundamental unit of physical delivery. | ||
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## 1. Standard operations | ||
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Just like shipping containers, Standard Containers define a set of STANDARD OPERATIONS. | ||
Shipping containers can be lifted, stacked, locked, loaded, unloaded and labelled. | ||
Similarly, Standard Containers can be created, started, and stopped using standard container tools (what this spec is about); copied and snapshotted using standard filesystem tools; and downloaded and uploaded using standard network tools. | ||
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## 2. Content-agnostic | ||
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Just like shipping containers, Standard Containers are CONTENT-AGNOSTIC: all standard operations have the same effect regardless of the contents. | ||
A shipping container will be stacked in exactly the same way whether it contains Vietnamese powder coffee or spare Maserati parts. | ||
Similarly, Standard Containers are started or uploaded in the same way whether they contain a postgres database, a php application with its dependencies and application server, or Java build artifacts. | ||
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## 3. Infrastructure-agnostic | ||
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Both types of containers are INFRASTRUCTURE-AGNOSTIC: they can be transported to thousands of facilities around the world, and manipulated by a wide variety of equipment. | ||
A shipping container can be packed in a factory in Ukraine, transported by truck to the nearest routing center, stacked onto a train, loaded into a German boat by an Australian-built crane, stored in a warehouse at a US facility, etc. | ||
Similarly, a standard container can be bundled on my laptop, uploaded to S3, downloaded, run and snapshotted by a build server at Equinix in Virginia, uploaded to 10 staging servers in a home-made Openstack cluster, then sent to 30 production instances across 3 EC2 regions. | ||
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## 4. Designed for automation | ||
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Because they offer the same standard operations regardless of content and infrastructure, Standard Containers, just like their physical counterparts, are extremely well-suited for automation. | ||
In fact, you could say automation is their secret weapon. | ||
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Many things that once required time-consuming and error-prone human effort can now be programmed. | ||
Before shipping containers, a bag of powder coffee was hauled, dragged, dropped, rolled and stacked by 10 different people in 10 different locations by the time it reached its destination. | ||
1 out of 50 disappeared. | ||
1 out of 20 was damaged. | ||
The process was slow, inefficient and cost a fortune - and was entirely different depending on the facility and the type of goods. | ||
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Similarly, before Standard Containers, by the time a software component ran in production, it had been individually built, configured, bundled, documented, patched, vendored, templated, tweaked and instrumented by 10 different people on 10 different computers. | ||
Builds failed, libraries conflicted, mirrors crashed, post-it notes were lost, logs were misplaced, cluster updates were half-broken. | ||
The process was slow, inefficient and cost a fortune - and was entirely different depending on the language and infrastructure provider. | ||
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## 5. Industrial-grade delivery | ||
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There are 17 million shipping containers in existence, packed with every physical good imaginable. | ||
Every single one of them can be loaded onto the same boats, by the same cranes, in the same facilities, and sent anywhere in the World with incredible efficiency. | ||
It is embarrassing to think that a 30 ton shipment of coffee can safely travel half-way across the World in *less time* than it takes a software team to deliver its code from one datacenter to another sitting 10 miles away. | ||
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With Standard Containers we can put an end to that embarrassment, by making INDUSTRIAL-GRADE DELIVERY of software a reality. |
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