> but if you hide the underlying system enough under abstraction layers what makes me choose between CoreOS or Docker or the future thing
From the Google/Amazon/Microsoft POV, that's part of the point.
From the CoreOS/Docker POV, the fact that the container technology that the major cloud hosts support is going to define their market whether they participate or not is probably why they have an incentive to participate.
> It seems the (excuse me for the buzzword) value add then quickly becomes in the people providing management software for Docker, rather than in Docker
Docker-the-company is probably going to be one of the "people" providing management support for the new standard container platform. From the advantage of also being one of the players defining the standard, and one of the key implementers of the basic software, which will give them an advantage in implementing management software.
> I'm sure that's NOT true, but it's confusing why they wouldn't want to seek differentiation to me
Sure, they want to seek differentiation. But they probably don't want differentiate themselves as "the vendor of the container technology that isn't backed by any of the major cloud hosts", when there is a container technology that is backed by those hosts.
> "Docker-the-company is probably going to be one of the "people" providing management support for the new standard container platform"
You would think, but it seems Kubernetes, CoreOS, ECS, and Mesos are the obvious picks right now for management stacks. Docker could drop the shiny UI on top of swarm/other soon, sure, and then they could build off the name-recognition, but they are definitely letting everyone have a running start. There's something said for last-mover advantage, but these types of apps are also non-trivial in storage/networking/other areas and somewhat hard to displace.
Obviously I am biased (working on Docker), but I thought I would mention a few facts.
- Today AWS announced they would support Docker Swarm and Compose natively on ECS.
- Last month devops.com surveyed development and ops teams about their usage of containers. Their conclusion was: "While this is still a nascent market, some early leaders did emerge from the responses. Docker Swarm, the orchestration technology from Docker itself, was the clear winner, with nearly 50% of respondents indicating that they planned to investigate Swarm. Close behind were Kubernetes and Mesos."
Personally I think the important part of that quote is "this is still a nascent market". We are the very, very beginning of these sorts of platforms, and nobody really knows what these platforms will evolve to be in a few years. So I really don't think it matters who has the most "market share" of the 0.00001% of IT organizations actually aware of these tools. The innovation is only just getting started.
From the Google/Amazon/Microsoft POV, that's part of the point.
From the CoreOS/Docker POV, the fact that the container technology that the major cloud hosts support is going to define their market whether they participate or not is probably why they have an incentive to participate.
> It seems the (excuse me for the buzzword) value add then quickly becomes in the people providing management software for Docker, rather than in Docker
Docker-the-company is probably going to be one of the "people" providing management support for the new standard container platform. From the advantage of also being one of the players defining the standard, and one of the key implementers of the basic software, which will give them an advantage in implementing management software.
> I'm sure that's NOT true, but it's confusing why they wouldn't want to seek differentiation to me
Sure, they want to seek differentiation. But they probably don't want differentiate themselves as "the vendor of the container technology that isn't backed by any of the major cloud hosts", when there is a container technology that is backed by those hosts.