Thanks Trevor for this summary; I agree that windows-native
containerization probably isn't very relevant to an SWC audience,
particularly as it is a ways off and these would be Windows-specific images
only.  Meanwhile, I fel the recent release of the Docker toolbox installers
for Mac & Windows (well, haven't tested the Windows one myself, will be
very curious to hear what Titus finds in his workshop!) have made the
process pretty streamlined and worlds away from how it was a few months ago
when boot2docker was still a thing and the process was much harder.

I've always felt that the preference for "native" installation in software
carpentry was based on very practical, rather than idealistic reasons.
Students should be able learn the tools they will use in the future, leave
still able to access those tools, while still keeping installation as
quick, cross-platform, and painless as possible.  Native installations have
won hands down in all of these areas so far.  Despite the fact that Docker
on Windows & Mac continues to use virtualization, a lot of top notch
software engineering has gone into these very goals over the past year, and
it is not obvious to me that what we currently consider as native
installation will always remain the best approach in the future.  (Perhaps
these issues are analogous to learning browser-based environments like
Jupyter that span across platforms and cloud instances rather than focusing
on more "native", OS-based development environments).   It's nice to hear
people experimenting.


Cheers,

Carl


On Sun, Nov 1, 2015 at 1:25 PM W. Trevor King <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 01, 2015 at 05:58:54AM -0800, C. Titus Brown wrote:
> > From what I understand, Juan is correct here; Docker runs inside of
> > lightweight VMs on both Mac and Windows.  Has this changed?
>
> Windows has recently added native containerization (e.g. see [1,2]),
> and there are Windows folks actively involved in the Open Container
> Initiative [3] which is is an attempt to build open standards around
> the container logic behind Docker [4].  So now you can run
> (Windows-specific) Docker images with native Windows containerization
> [5].  But how long it takes until your average SWC learner shows up
> with a Windows laptop that can do what can now only be done in the
> Windows Server 2016 Tech Preview 3 is anybody's guess ;).  And you'd
> still need folks with access to Windows boxes to generate the images
> for those learners to run.
>
> Cheers,
> Trevor
>
> [1]:
> https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscontainers/about/about_overview
> [2]:
> https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscontainers/quick_start/manage_docker
> [3]: http://opencontainers.org/
> [4]: https://blog.docker.com/2015/06/runc/
> [5]: http://blog.docker.com/2015/08/tp-docker-engine-windows-server-2016/
>
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