52 lines
4.2 KiB
Markdown
52 lines
4.2 KiB
Markdown
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# The 5 principles of Standard Containers
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Define a unit of software delivery called a Standard Container.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Shipping containers can be lifted, stacked, locked, loaded, unloaded and labelled.
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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.
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A shipping container will be stacked in exactly the same way whether it contains Vietnamese powder coffee or spare Maserati parts.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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1 out of 50 disappeared.
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1 out of 20 was damaged.
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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.
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Builds failed, libraries conflicted, mirrors crashed, post-it notes were lost, logs were misplaced, cluster updates were half-broken.
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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.
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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.
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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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