Multi-arch All The Things

[This post was written by Phil Estes and Michael Friis.]

True multi-platform workload portability has long been the holy grail of enterprise computing. All kinds of virtualization strategies have been used over the years to approximate this dream to varying levels of acceptable performance or usability. On the one hand, virtual machines and hardware virtualization are flexible enough that you can mix and match operating systems (and even CPU architectures) on the same host—but they come with a lot of overhead. However, language-based virtual runtimes don’t have packaging formats that encapsulate all system-level app dependencies, and that makes them unsuitable for general-purpose deployment and configuration management.

Docker came along as a unique type of virtualization that only virtualizes the operating system for container processes. Docker uses existing Linux kernel features to offer isolation characteristics that are similar to what is available with virtual machines. The analogy of a “standard shipping container,” combined with these isolation primitives, caught developer interest immediately. With this new shipping metaphor came speed and agility that blew the doors off virtual machine size and speed constraints that impacted developer workflow, not to mention developer happiness! The containerization craze has grown like wildfire since then, but Continue reading