It really is striking how products like Docker, even while delivering incredible value, continuously fail to message themselves in an intelligible way. If you go to https://www.docker.com, you see:
"Build, Ship and Run. Any App, Anywhere."
Jesus Christ. I get that you're The Future, but make the value prop for me here, at least. Why should I use Docker? What parts of my stack does it replace? When does the cost-benefit make sense? What new things can I do that I couldn't do before?
Thanks for the frank feedback. I agree that we have a lot of "wiggle room", as you so diplomatically put it. Out of curiosity how do you feel about the current README on Docker's repo? https://github.com/docker/docker/blob/master/README.md
One problem we've encountered is that the audience for Docker is incredible broad - much broader than you might imagine when reading Hacker News for example. It is extremely common for CIOs, IT directors, and various business managers to just pick up the phone to ask us (or our partners) what Docker is all about. So it's difficult to tell a story which satisfies all audiences.
But I don't think that excuses everything. We are definitely better at building our product than at explaining it.
One interesting side-effect is that, if you've been exposed to Docker-related marketing (in a broad sense), most of it probably didn't originate from us, the creators of Docker. This is sometimes problematic because Docker is so polarizing: depending on who tells you about it you will get such a different, often distorted picture of reality. Either Docker is a miracle cure for every disease on Earth (indicating an over-enthusiastic Docker fan, or a vendor trying to sell something to Docker fans), or it's a scourge sent by the gods of the Unix valhalla to punish mankind for techno-hipster false idols such as javascript and php (indicating a jaded Docker-skeptic, or someone trying to sell something to Docker-skeptics). Either way, it creates a lot of noise. And as you point out, there might be less noise if we ourselves did a better job at explaining when using Docker is, or is not, a good solution.
Big platforms tend to be different things to different people. Might help to have a different "what is docker?" page for the various roles you encounter.
For CIOs: click here
For developers: click here
For sysadmins/devops: click here
For platform providers (e.g. heroku): click here.
Whenever I see a product segmented that way, I'm immediately suspicious.
That much work means that a) they're trying to sell something because it isn't obviously better and b) they're more worried about messaging than being simple and useful.
> they're more worried about messaging than being simple and useful
But useful means different things to different people. To a dev, Docker might mean you keep your environment clean, scripting of automated testing, and have platform agnostic deployments. To the CIO, Docker means your devs spend less time futzing around with their stuff and more time working on the product. Or that he can upgrade his infrastructure gradually and not have to worry about compatibility. Yes, it's the same thing, but different audiences need different messaging.
> To the CIO, Docker means your devs spend less time futzing around with their stuff and more time working on the product
The question is whether or not the CIO knows that the devs are in fact futzing around with ad hoc solutions to problems that Docker solves.
I think the parent is arguing that in the right flow of things, that awareness is going to flow up to them from the people closest to the problem (the dev/ops folks working with it) rather than from a vendor with a vested interest in adoption to an exec/manager whose understanding of the problems their staff face may well be a high-level view at best. And who are prone to make decisions off of social proof plus that good messaging rather than knowing how well the solution fits their problems.
(Not that having the engineering staff involved is any guarantee that decision won't be mostly made off of social proof plus messaging. It just decreases the chances. :/ )
From my experience, it's not either-or. First you need "bottom-up" adoption by actual practitioners (in the case of Docker, developers and sysadmins). Then you also need to understand the constraints and requirements of people who are in a position to say "no". Those include managers, but also procurement, architects, network engineers, security teams, etc. Those people aren't the ones championing your product (most of the time they don't have very strong opinions either way), but they have a job to do, and if a new dev tool affects their ability to do their job, they're going to say "no".
It's very common for developers or sysadmin to contact us and ask for a powerpoint deck, so that they can give a convincing presentation to their management about the virtues of using Docker in their new project. We even have specialized teams that go in and do everything they can to help Docker-based projects succeed.
But as you point out, it all starts with someone inside the organization who really, really wants to use your product. Otherwise no amount of messaging is going to save you.
That's funny, I get the exact opposite feeling. They understand their audience and they know how to communicate with them. But without being secretive; any curious cat can see what the others are being told.
In fact, imprecise or unclear messaging is usually a red flag.
I'll tell ya, the biggest conceptual problem for me is "where does the data go". This subject isn't touched in the Docker material until very late; and even then, it's brushed over.
To me, docker can be thought of as a process wrapper. The executable is called an image, and the running process called a container. The benefit of docker is three-fold: 1) each process thinks it has an OS to itself, which is a killer feature for native binaries that have weird dependencies 2) network (port) indirection, and 3) filesystem indirection (mounting an arbitrary host dir into an arbitrary container dir).
Against all of this is the whole question of how to really use it to develop and deploy custom software! You could, for example, develop and deploy Java without ever installing Java on the host (not even the development host). But when you are finally ready to deploy, how is that supposed to work? Which pieces are static, which dynamic? Do you bake your binary into the image, or do you mount the binary from the (remote) host filesystem?
The docker docs don't answer any of these questions, and I really think it should.
Solomon, I gave a talk at lunch at your company about this very topic, but I think you weren't there, so you missed it. Ask avinson for a link to it. I think it was saved on your BlueJeans system.
> Thanks for the frank feedback. I agree that we have a lot of "wiggle room", as you so diplomatically put it. Out of curiosity how do you feel about the current README on Docker's repo? https://github.com/docker/docker/blob/master/README.md
I have two thoughts on this.
First, if CIOs and IT directors are calling, then it's possible they're confused by the website, too.
Second, the README is definitely better, but would be even better by being more specific and exaggerating less. If it's targeted to web apps and back end services, say that in the first place, instead of "any application." Can I run iPhone apps in Docker? Are there Docker packaged apps in the iTunes store? If my application runs on an Arduino, can it also use Docker?
> If it's targeted to web apps and back end services, say that in the first place, instead of "any application."
That was deliberate. Although obviously most people use Docker for web apps today, there is no reason they can't try it in other contexts too. For example, there is a very vibrant sub-community of people dockerizing desktop apps, and running Docker on embedded devices like Raspberri Pi etc. There are also (very) experimental ports to Android, and I heard of at least one person who after learning that Tesla is a modified Ubuntu under the hood, set out to try and run Docker on it (I don't know if they succeeded).
I read over and over about docker, did some tutorials. But when my boss asked me: should we use it? And can you please explain one more time what is it anyway? I simply say, well, it IS like a VM but without the VM. No other explanation stuck for me, and I'm sure it's a wrong description of what is docket, but the messaging so far got at least this part for me as the quintessential "what's that docker thing again?"
It's a VM that doesn't need a full guest OS. It's a sandbox. I'm sure I'm wrong but I can't think of another ELI5 for this.
The problem is, it's not a full sandbox, because all of the containers are running on the same kernel, and are capable of influencing the others, at least indirectly.
I have trouble with the idea of calling them 'the future'. So far, I haven't seen a REAL reason to use docker in a production environment.
Anecdotally, something I've seen work in the B2B space is framing the message `n` different ways for each type (n) of stakeholder. So you'd have a quick view of value props and stories for the CIO, the IT director, etc. Sometimes it's hard to find the general value proposition, and it's much easier to have the different cohorts self-select into the message that means the most to them. And sure, sometimes this doesn't cut it and you have to get on the phone.
The general message could still be there (kitchy and sexy), the focus would still be on the end user (developer), but others wouldn't have a hard time finding the message that resonates with them.
Has anyone else seen this strategy succeed (or fail) for their business?
From the perspective of this longtime software developer, this isn't that great either. I'll try to give some specifics.
* The terms "container" and "containerization" seem to mean a lot to the author of the document, but they're never defined well and they're used an awful lot despite this. That kind of thing isn't half-bad marketspeak if the point is to get people thinking about this in the vague "It's the future!" manner that The Fine Article is satirizing (and/or accurately reporting as part of the social dynamics of the industry). The invocation of an unfamiliar term over and over can serve as a form of social proof and generates curiosity. But it might well be what's triggering suspicion on the part of some engineers.
* Positioning containers as an alternative to VMs is somewhat helpful in giving at least some idea of what kind of rough problem space we're working in -- someone familiar with a VM knows that they're often used to reproduce the specific runtime environment a given application needs. But by the end of the section I still have no real idea how "containers" are different other than that they're "lighter." Except for one clue: I know what FreeBSD jails are. So I might guess that something like them is involved -- but you're describing them as "primitives", so there's something else involved and I don't see an explanation of what it is. Is Docker a glorified chroot jail? If it's something more, what's the additional value?
* And... two sections down "escape dependency hell" -- that might be the additional value prop! But again, this section is really confusing. Dependency management means package management, right? But it's being done with Yet Another New Undefined Entity called "Layers" without replacing any other package manager so... we have two package managers? Or Layers aren't package management? What the hell are they? I could guess they're something like an image but I have no idea.
* "Plays well with others" Gives strong hints this is mostly a Unix thing (which, if this is some kind of enhanced chroot jail makes sense). Somewhat in conflict with the hints of platform agnosticism earlier in the document. Is there a story here for Windows, either as a host or for windows apps?
* "Real World Examples" These tell me how to "Dockerize" different server apps... but there's no context about why I might want to do this. What problem am I trying to solve?
And that's the thing -- at the end of this, I don't know what problem I might be trying to solve with Docker. I might guess Docker helps me deploy an application along with a specific normalized runtime environment, but that's from a lot of guessing and reading between the lines rather than from an upfront communication from the text itself.
If my description is accurate, a clearer version of it should be your first sentence. Followed by a second paragraph telling me enough about some specific frictions you've done away with compared to other solutions that I'm wanting to learn more. Then tell me some specific stories about situations where someone might have a problem that Docker is a good fit for, and explain the rough usage that be applied to address it.
I'm not ignorant. I understand VM and virtualization in general. I understand chroot. I understand how The ANSI-Standard Multitasking Multiuser OS works. It still took me a few attempts to understand what Docker even is because, frankly, it isn't quite any of those things.
It's a lot more akin to what Plan 9 was doing with namespaces, but I think they take it a bit further. It finally clicked when someone described it in terms of "multiple distros on the same kernel at the same time" and then defined a distro in terms of being an init process and a userspace. That makes sense. Reading up on the clone(2) system call, which is where the 'magic' is, made it even clearer.
But that's impenetrably technical unless you already have a pretty good background in operating systems. As any marketer will tell you, being technical is poison. Ideally, you should be able to sell the product in terms of what it will allow, not how it works. Except with Docker, that's hard: "Oh, it will allow me to run multiple applications at once. It's... an OS kernel? Nope, it says it's Linux. So it's a distro? Nope... uh... is it a new VM? Nope, not that, they all have to share the same kernel... what?"
I guess my point is Docker is hard to market. The website is either going to be vague or rather dense, and vague seems to win.
Pretty much this. I was working on a simple Rails app to get familiar with Rails and someone mentioned Docker to me. So I went to their website, did the tutorial, didn't understand why this is essential or better and just pushed to Heroku instead. Half of the time, if not more, I have no idea why this or that technology is being pushed so much or mentioned or whatever. And the landing page is not making it easier. Sometimes I feel like web development is more complicated than it should be.
The problem is not that they "message themselves" (gross) wrong, but that they feel like they have to "message" at all. Sales & marketing mumbo jumbo has no place in devtools -- it is at best, obfuscation -- at worst, misrepresentation.
I find that position to be very hard to understand - devtools live or die by their adoption. A clear understanding of what a tool does is critical to its adoption.
Look at, say, the homepage of Ruby: https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/. There's a clear, two sentence explanation of what it is:
A dynamic, open source programming language with a
focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an
elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write.
There's an example embedded on the page. There's also recent news that intermediate users might be interested in.
On Docker's website, there's a huge amount of confusion about what Docker even is. A platform? A runtime? Both? Which is the one I should care about?
The nerd-centric viewpoint that tool should succeed entirely on their own merits, with no affordances for the user, is crazy. It's that attitude towards UX that has lead to the following one-liner to being the only way to do something so mundane as "removing all your untagged images":
"I find that position to be very hard to understand - devtools live or die by their adoption"
Some of the time, that is true, but not all the time, maybe not most of the time -- you are putting the cart before the horse. In fact, I would argue that this is an anti-pattern. Yes, you might use (e.g. to pick 2 unrelated domains) Hadoop or Python because they are popular, but consider how they got popular in the first place.
Devtools exist to solve a problem. You should not evaluate devtools based on the webpage or how many people are using it. That way lies Oracle enterprise. :-)
The problem with Docker's website is not that it exists. It is that it substitutes sales & marketing for just simply explaining what it is to a developer. While one could classify this under the category of "marketing", it would be a mistake -- kind of like classifying man pages as sales pitches. Just tell me what the fuck it does for god sakes and I'll decide! I could give a rats ass whether Facebook uses it, etc...
To be clear, I find Docker, the tool, useful, I just think it doesn't need "Marketing", it needs a useful webpage.[1]
Ruby was not adopted because of its webpage or its user base, it was adopted because one person bothered to look into it, liked it and decided to build a very popular web framework around it. Others saw the value in that domain and it exploded. Similar situation for Linux, which started from an FTP site and usenet posting. :-)
"The nerd-centric viewpoint that tool should succeed entirely on their own merits, with no affordances for the user, is crazy."
Unrelated to what I was talking about entirely. Affordances to the user is a merit of the tool itself. Docker could be considerably easier to use in some regards, and that would improve it's usefulness as a dev tool. However, this has nothing to do with attempting to gain marketshare with no direct relation to merit.
[1] But then Docker, the organization, is selling something, aren't they?
> To be clear, I find Docker, the tool, useful, I just think it doesn't need "Marketing", it needs a useful webpage
What exactly do you think Marketing is? It's not all about BS, it's about communicating a message. If that's a simple webpage, then so be it. Often an idea or product is far too complicated to explain through 2-3 lines of text and needs more.
> Devtools exist to solve a problem. You should not evaluate devtools based on the webpage or how many people are using it.
That sounds rational and it's what I used to think, but I think this talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzzL_QDKv0c) makes a good case that fuzzy human factors always play a role in technical decisions, and that's not necessarily bad.
Eg, which is better, Angular or Ember? Ruby or Python? Go or C++? Haskell or Common Lisp? You can accomplish the same things in either tool. Which you like better has a lot to do with what you already know. And popularity may seem like a shallow measure, but it affects whether you can get questions answered, find blog posts and books, locate a library to do something for you, and hire developers who already know the technology.
Popularity is probably also weakly correlated with stability. If my custom jQuery code doesn't work, there's a 99.999% chance that it's the fault of the code I wrote (used by 1 person) rather than of jQuery (used by thousands). When jQuery was new and used by tens of people, there was a higher chance that it was jQuery's fault.
"Ruby was not adopted because of its webpage or its user base, it was adopted because one person bothered to look into it, liked it and decided to build a very popular web framework around it."
I agree with everything else you're saying completely. Although messaging a value prop is hard when you have so many use cases. We faced the same issue and ended up trying to segment users as quickly and high up in the funnel as possible so we could speak directly to their needs.
A clear understanding of what a tool does is critical to its adoption.
The definitions of "clear" differ depending on who the target audience is. If you're assuming a heterogenous group of unknown faces, then you aim for colloquial and simplified language.
When marketing to programmers, however, the use of technical jargon and specific concepts is an absolute necessity for something to attain clarity. It's the avoidance of such that obfuscates meaning.
The nerd-centric viewpoint that tool should succeed entirely on their own merits, with no affordances for the user, is crazy
This is a straw man. Introductions can be concise or detailed, but they must convey some of the technical intricacies and underpinnings regarding the software. Using marketing language, clouds of buzzwords and too many dumb copy-paste examples leads to cargo cult development and people who jump on bandwagons as opposed to surveying for what is technically superior.
Furthermore, there's nothing wrong with your one-liner.
Getting people to use things requires communicating to them what the things is for, and how it is better than other alternatives, and how to use it to realize that benefit.
Therefore, devtool adoption requires messaging related to what the devtool is for, how the devtool is superior to other alternatives in the same space, and how to use the devtool to realize that superiority.
Actually having the tool is a start, but its not the ballgame if no one can understand what its for, why they should use it over other things that serve the same purpose, and how to use it.
I get that you want to make people aware of the tool and its advantages because you think others might find it useful. But what part of that requires any attention to the condescending idea of "messaging" vs just straight up telling people (a) what it does and (b) why you created it.
Anyway, perhaps I'm being a grumpy old man late in the workday, I'll leave it be :-)
> But what part of that requires any attention to the condescending idea of "messaging" vs just straight up telling people (a) what it does and (b) why you created it.
"messaging" isn't a condescending idea, its simply having clear, coherent means of communicating some message, with awareness of the audience that message is directed to. Like, what your product is for and why people should (and how they can) use it.
You are correct, and the people downvoting you are wrong. Technical engineering decisions should be made on the basis of concrete analysis and not popularity contests. The noisy kids will come around sooner or later.
"Build, Ship and Run. Any App, Anywhere."
Jesus Christ. I get that you're The Future, but make the value prop for me here, at least. Why should I use Docker? What parts of my stack does it replace? When does the cost-benefit make sense? What new things can I do that I couldn't do before?
They made a separate page just to address this giant "Huh?": https://www.docker.com/whatisdocker, which I feel is equally obtuse.
Luckily, the product itself is fantastic, so that gives you a lot of wiggle room on your website and documentation. Like, a lot.