Webcasting from the Red Hat Summit 2014 in San Francisco, John Furrier and Stu Miniman, theCUBE co-hosts, interviewed Solomon Hykes, Founder and CTO with Docker.

Docker was referred to as “the buzz of the show,” by Furrier, who asked Hykes to give a quick update on the company.

“Docker and Red Hat are jointly announcing even more collaboration. Docker will be supported as part of the new RHEL version. Red Hat is allowing us to train some of their customers to deploy Docker and OpenShift is announced as standardizing on top of Docker,” said Hykes.

Next up Furrier asked for a ‘history lesson’, inquiring on the number of employees and the recent changes.

“It’s 30 of us today, and Docker used to be called DotCloud. We changed names about 6 months ago. As part of the name change we raised 15 million dollars in series B. Before that, as DotCloud, we raised 10 million dollars in series A, in 2011,” obliged Hykes.

“Why the name change?” asked Furrier.

“DotCloud is a PaaS. It hosts and runs people’s applications online, keeps them available, etc. As part of that product we developed a lot of underlined technology, including container deployment and automation technology. We open-sourced that and became so popular that it became a thing, even bigger than DotCloud had ever been. So, changing the company was just admitting Docker was the biggest thing.”

What comes first: data or software?

 .

“We talk about containers all the time, wondering if they come first or the data, or the software,” said Furrier, asking Hykes to comment on that.

“It actually starts with the application. There’s a lot of applications being built today, new kinds of applications, so I think it does start with the software. What do you want software to do? You want applications that do new things, incredible things and, for that to be possible, you need a new kind of architecture. I’d like to think of the container as the Lego brick that makes that architecture possible. It’s the starting point, the fundamental unit,” explained Hykes.

Asked to talk about the container more in detail, Hykes continued: “A container is a unit of deployment. It is the format in which you package your application – all the files, all the executables, all the libraries, all the dependencies in one thing that you can move to any server and deploy in a repeatable way. It’s similar to how you would run an iOS app on an iPhone, for example.”

• More on containers

“The best description I’ve heard of what containers can do,” said Miniman, “is that it separates the application management from the infrastructure management. It reminds me a lot about PaaS can do. Where do the containers fit with the Red Hat ecosystem, with OpenShift and OpenStack?” he asked.

“Docker came out as PaaS, DotCloud itself is a PaaS, so it’s very connected. PaaS is a very specific way to use containers. By definition, when you’re doing the PaaS, you’re offering a specialized value-add solution for certain kinds of applications,” explained Hykes. “When you want to build a universal platform, one that everyone can build on top of, you need to break it down into a smaller, fundamental unit, because there isn’t a single cookie cutter PaaS everyone can use. There’s a lot of customization going on,” noted Hykes.

“Containers make a lot of sense, it’s a great way to have application delivery,” added Furrier, who wanted Hykes to compare and contrast Docker versus the main products on the market.

“Docker gets compared to a lot of tools out there in the DevOps world, and the answer is Docker is not a direct replacement of those; you can use them together. Docker does its own thing. It is a container engine.”

• The value of open source

“Coopetition is always good. The value of open source is in standardizing things and federating effort. The big thing to watch out for at any given time is either ‘you want to do something new’ or ‘you want to join an existing effort’.  And, if you’re joining an existing effort, are you doing it constructively? or are you forking a competing implementation?” pondered Hykes.