So let's talk about this. 1
This Docker arm thing normal. 2
What's your take. 3
I think it's a great move on both companies parts. 4
I think it's a good move for the community in general arm and the acceleration of IO T and non ex 86 5
chipsets especially as it goes to more of infrastructure server roles. 6
It has been accelerating tremendously in the last I would say five years. 7
You know the oftentimes as as technologists and hobby hobbyists and smart home hackers we we usually 8
touch arm in the Raspberry Pi kind of world in the hobby electronics world. 9
However one might not know that ARM processors are essentially in a lot of the hardware devices that 10
are at the core of network infrastructure wireless infrastructure mobile devices. 11
You know every piece of hardware in your car in your in your fridge your washing machine wherever. 12
Right. 13
And so this announcement kind of opens up the world of dev ops and all the advances in efficiencies 14
that the traditional dev ops software development world has been gaining advantages in because of Docker 15
and container containers. 16
It opens up the the this new hardware world to that. 17
And one of the biggest gaps as someone who has done some hardware hacking in the past has worked on 18
hardware projects at work doing that loop of development and testing on hardware at the edge has been 19
its pi. 20
The biggest gap in the market right now and I think this announcement is is kind of twofold one is aimed 21
at closing that gap making it easier to develop on those hardware platforms and then also as ARM processors 22
are going to the server market making it. 23
So just like Docker solves that problem for dev ops it solves that problem going from hardware to be 24
able to write code just normal software development code in on the server space. 25
Right. 26
And there's some joint announcements around eight of us having a dedicated arm instances and AC two 27
and I think there's a lot of advantages there. 28
And I'll leave I'll leave some space for Mike to comment on it but I've some follow up there as well. 29
You basically took it all. 30
Jeez. 31
I mean we're leaving you with back and reinvent Adobe was announcing the arm easy to instances and everything 32
and you just see a dramatic price reduction there too. 33
I admit I looked at it like how can I take advantage of these to start saving some money on my servers 34
and everything and so now I'm making this much easier and more importantly officially supported means 35
for building containers and everything and I'm excited to see where it goes I mean I haven't done a 36
lot in the IOC space but I definitely see how now it's going to be much more accessible to be able to 37
write in again open up the UPS pipelines and everything like Naren was talking about. 38
Yeah. 39
Yeah. 40
And how we can we can start talking at these i o t conferences and arm conferences and I think there's 41
gonna be an uptick honestly of around the hardware side and it's a world where I don't I don't know 42
if there's a lot of cross in in between our industries right. 43
We have the typical distribute application developers folks that are migrating legacy apps trying to 44
figure out the cloud future. 45
There's other worlds out there automotive industrial IO T Mobile even the VRA are in game gaming world 46
and they're at various stages of this dev ops journey. 47
And I think this just opens up that world to to the new way of doing things that the cloud world has 48
kind of gone accustomed to Yeah. 49
Yeah I think you know us x eighty six peoples which is essentially all the laptops. 50
You know if you're on a laptop or a desktop machine you're watching this on an Intel processor most 51
likely. 52
And we sort of have the spoils of of all the features and all the great software and arm has traditionally 53
been a place where it's because the processors were so tiny they're focused on battery and efficiency 54
that they always they that they haven't been number one right there hasn't been the place where all 55
of that great stuff is. 56
But I think I think for me largely due to the smartphone decade that we've had that has really changed 57
a lot because ALM has been around a while. 58
They're not necessarily new. 59
And you know in case you didn't know arm for the audience arm is arm doesn't the company doesn't actually 60
make a processor. 61
I had to learn this recently. 62
They they licensed their licensing and consulting and an expertise company but they don't make the silicon 63
themselves which is a really interesting model it's the opposite model of Intel so I was watching yesterday 64
after the announcement from Docker I was watching and there's a YouTube video on arm from Azure it's 65
actually from Microsoft's a few YouTube around you can probably find that video and it's one of the 66
guys that helped build a data centers or is in charge of data centers talking about their data center 67
designs. 68
And the interesting position for him was it wasn't even about savings in terms of energy or whatever. 69
For them it was a matter of vendor choice that they right now. 70
If you think about it they're all these data centers in the world. 71
They're running next 86 there. 72
They basically have two vendor choices you know a M.D. and Intel and that is they're sort of the linchpin 73
of their entire company to build to build these data centers. 74
So for them ALM allows them to then I think Microsoft was saying they had at least three different chip 75
manufacturers that they had partnered with to make ARM chips for their datacenter. 76
So now they look at this as like a diversity play of being able to have all the different options in 77
case something happens that one vendor or one set of chips is delayed or something that they can move 78
something around. 79
And for those of us that are on on scripting languages like P2P no J.S. Ruby Perl in those sorts of 80
things from my point of view if you're talking about cloud infrastructure that's not French the same 81
way on arm that it runs on intel right. 82
Nowadays we just kind of do a docker pull on those images and those all just run in fact from my checking 83
all the official images I looked at all have arm counterparts in fact let's just take a look at that. 84
Let's go look at the No.1 real quick. 85
I think what you're kind of pulling up on is that Docker has had the ability to run on ARM processors 86
for a little while now. 87
I think it's I think Justin was mentioning that just in-car comment is mentioning that it's been like 88
couple of years where there have been arm based images this announcement of makes it more production 89
ready. 90
There's a commitment there from both sides and you know there's still some issues there. 91
It's not a first class citizen yet. 92
And now it is going to be and there's past the kind of hello world kind of examples you do get some 93
gotchas. 94
And the other part of this is in my in my view point is when you're talking about these different hardware 95
platforms often you're also talking about chips that are communicating to other pieces of hardware that 96
might be unique over USP cereal some other interfaces and interconnecting those into containers. 97
So can get a little tricky these days and when you're talking about a GP use and several connections 98
and hardware level timing and robotics more more work still needs to be done on the darker world to 99
be able to support that. 100
But this announcement is kind of an opening of hey we're taking this seriously and yes we're going to 101
work. 102
Keep working on improving how Docker runs on these platforms so it's even easier in the future to develop 103
against your custom hardware. 104
Yeah. 105
I'm excited to see kind of how this folds in with orchestration everything. 106
I mean imagine opening up a docker e environment and going to you CPE and centre I want to deploy these 107
containers across my C device fleet or whatever so it'll be interesting to see where this evolves where 108
this goes in the future. 109
Yeah yeah. 110
A lot of this works today. 111
I mean that's what's the announcement I think someone announced you can tell like you know industry 112
analyst analysts aren't engineers usually. 113
And so when they're putting titles up against Tech Crunch Docker developers can now build arm containers 114
on your desktops. 115
That title actually would have been the same title like three years ago you could have done that three 116
years ago. 117
Nothing has changed. 118
I think Dockers basically going to meet their goal is to eventually make it easier. 119
You were saying the pass smoother from dev test to prod. 120
But if you go into this just look at the node image for example there's this whole list of architectures 121
where you can do Docker run node on any of these platforms we're talking old arm 32 bit ARM the latest 122
arm V8 32 bit X 86 which is i3 86 PPC which is I don't know was using that anymore and then I think 123
s S3 90 X is a mainframe chip. 124
So actually funny story When Docker con Copenhagen so a year and a half ago now kind of did a little 125
hackathon with a couple of the other captains there and I was playing around with making an alternative 126
a swarm visualise and we had it working with both Andy 64 and arm and on the S3 96 and windows and so 127
produced one node and that can run on four different architectures. 128
And it was kind of fun to say you know this app will run on both arm and IBM mainframe and I've never 129
even touched a mainframe in my life right. 130
I work on it it's just what I mean really cool. 131
What does it mean. 132
Yeah yeah. 133
This DCP will still work on a mainframe I don't know. 134
Yeah yeah I know it's I mean that's I think one of the big goals that I always got out of Docker early 135
on was you know not only making it easy to run any app the same way with the same commands but they're 136
also making any architecture able to run the same thing with the same command. 137
So the goal eventually and it's not all complete like the whole path manifest files and all these different 138
things multi arches not all completely smooth that but we're really far I think down the road of you 139
being able to build an app it be on multiple processor architectures at the same time it's one code 140
base and you store it in one repo on the Internet and you pull it you pull it based on your decision 141
so then people think well multi arch why I really care. 142
I usually know what architecture I want to use and sort of the example that I give is like you might 143
want something like on a no JSF you might want some of that architecture to run in the cloud. 144
And up until recently if you want eight of us or Azure you had to run it on x 86 like you did not have 145
an arm processor to run it on. 146
So if you're going to test and see eye and do all that sort of stuff on your code before you shipped 147
it out to maybe your IO T devices you had you didn't have a lot of choices for running it on raw bare 148
metal arm stuff. 149
Right. 150
So it was nice to have all these images and be able to test them and then just basically change the 151
from image to a different architecture and then your code is built into a new image that's kind of how 152
I was talking about it but now now that we have like eight of us is a one instances. 153
So if you weren't if you weren't aware from the Amazons conference the most recent one they NWS announced 154
that they have they they're making their own silicon just like Microsoft and they have these A1 instances 155
that start with A1 mediums and work their way up. 156
And what's crazy is like right out of the box they have 10 gigabit. 157
So sixteen dollars a month for a single AMD processor but it's got 10 gigabit networking so all I can 158
think about is like if I've got a network bandwidth things like that's where I'm putting it is on and 159
it's dramatically reduced in price compared to the six versions too. 160
So yeah yeah yeah I think that's that's where a lot of that lies. 161
I think there's going to be cost advantages. 162
Power consumption advantages bandwidth it's also on a trend overall of you know custom silicon and custom 163
hardware especially as we start to go into machine learning A.I.. 164
A lot of companies are going to start baking their algorithms and making their own hardware in their 165
own silicon specialize toward very specific machine learning algorithms spaceship specific type of applications 166
and developing against those is typically been a really big challenge to make your own compilers you 167
have to make sure that you're developing environments of the same. 168
I think these announcements are kind of the first baby steps toward opening up advances in in not just 169
you Intel X 86 centric development across the board. 170
Yeah yeah it's gonna it's gonna be what I mean ideally a few years from now we'll have the situation 171
where we maybe are ready here for a lot of people but for the US normal people it's gonna be this decision 172
of what is the let me test on a different architectures and let me see which ones the most energy efficient 173
or better or you know cost effective for my performance that needs that I have and I'm just gonna choose 174
that and it doesn't. 175
It's an interesting world because for the longest time in fact one of the things I wanted to bring up 176
about this topic was 177
the founder of Linux Linus a couple of months ago when I think it was after the ADA U.S. announcement 178
he basically came out and was it was gonna play a video. 179
Yeah. 180
He was really it was I thought was a very interesting discussion I was having we was basically saying 181
just because ALM exists doesn't mean that it's going to be like this major player the bit let's all 182
look back at the reason that X 86 became so successful and his argument was around everyone having this 183
commodity hardware that was the same processor architecture type as in production so that they could 184
just play locally tests locally then run it on a server somewhere and that was the real one of the big 185
secrets to the success and that arm doesn't have that yet. 186
So when I read this I think that this should be turned around now and there should be a new so much 187
that needs to write a blog post that basically says Linus is right and Docker and arm together are going 188
to be the bet most likely successful way we're going to solve this problem yeah. 189
And I don't I don't know if it's you know the use case of like server side doesn't necessarily talk 190
about power consumption or cost. 191
You know we kind of. 192
Yes to an extent. 193
Commodities. 194
But once you start going away from servers and you start to interact with devices and the cloud and 195
multiple architectures and GP use it that's a different story completely. 196
Like Linus is right about a specific area which is kind of commodity software development and commodity 197
applications. 198
But the minute you start venturing off that farm that that territory it's it gets it's a little bit 199
harder and it's not there yet. 200
And so that being said though I think Almond is a lot in a lot of places and we touch it every day and 201
does that mean that it's a good thing that it's hidden. 202
Probably not. 203
I mean if it's I mean for every x 86 chip how many arm chips are there you know that are running. 204
I don't know. 205
Right I'm sure there's a multiplication there are a multiple there. 206
Yeah. 207
So yeah I forgot how many how many. 208
They hadn't announced but something about the billions of how many billions of it was I and I hesitate 209
to call because I pride misquote but it was something like from the start of arm as a company till the 210
two thousand somewhere they made like 50 billion chips and then the next four years they made 50 billion 211
chips so and then the next like three years they made 50 billion chips or something like that. 212
And so it's essentially almost I want to say exponential but it looks like an exponential amount of 213
chips are made. 214
I think that's going to change anytime soon you know. 215
And traditionally those chips have been found in hardware devices not necessarily on the server themselves 216
but you know what's not a server these days. 217
Right. 218
Oh right. 219
I mean yeah. 220
To me it means like if you're going to if you're interested in doing something like let's say you want 221
to make a custom you know situation on arm like maybe you're not just a node programmer but you're a 222
little a low level programmer like traditionally you'd have to go get you know you have to go get a 223
Raspberry Pi and then figure out how to develop an ad or you have to buy an arm laptop and then you 224
have to deal with the limitations of that for development. 225
So yeah. 226
So I've got these like I don't know if you can see that I got these little development boards. 227
I don't know. 228
I don't think they are. 229
Maybe they are. 230
I'm not sure. 231
But you know there's a full stack server on this on this little thing. 232
It's the same thing that's in the Amazon Dash button essentially. 233
Okay. 234
And it's got you know it's got FTB it's got a web server. 235
It's I mean what's not a server. 236
You know I made my toaster eventually is going to have a server on it for no reason. 237
I mean right. 238
It probably already does. 239
If you get one with like an LCD panel on it it's probably got a little arm chip just to just to power 240
that on their website they say one hundred and thirty billion chips more. 241
More than 130 billion. 242
There's only seven billion people on the planet right. 243
So more than 70 percent of the world's population are using ARM technology sensors to smartphones to 244
supercomputers. 245
Yeah. 246
So I think it's really cool. 247
I'm excited how easy it is it's almost so easy that the demos kind of like OK cool I'm running arm so 248
you know you're on Tucker desktop. 249
So if you're if you're just running or desktop you can run arm code right now you can just either specify 250
the platform in your Docker run command or you can just specify the image that is arm based. 251
And it just runs and it's using that because of QM you if you're not familiar with that 252
cue EMU dot org it's in a processor emulator essentially. 253
But think of it like virtualization the same way that it works the same way the virtualization does. 254
And it just allows it's been around a while it's not a docker thing Docker just bundles it into Docker 255
desktop by default. 256
And that's what we've been all talking about. 257
So if you go on what's crazy if you go into YouTube right now and you just search like Raspberry Pi 258
Docker or armed Docker or something like that you'll find three up to five years worth of videos of 259
people demoing how this all stuff all this stuff works. 260
So one of that one of the challenges with this announcement yesterday is it's it's here like surprise. 261
You've had it for five years. 262
It just works like you don't need to wait for the next release. 263
You don't need to wait for Dr. Khan. 264
What what that announcement to me was really about was what we learned was like Docker e is going to 265
come to arm right like there's going to be official doctor support for the arm instead of it just works. 266
It'll be well you can actually call us for support with this kind of thing that you know. 267
Yeah the developer workflow experience is going to get better hopefully we'll have easier dealing with 268
a multiple arch images and all that stuff and news will be announced. 269
Dr. Khan next week too I mean a whole new slew of tools and stuff coming. 270
Yeah yeah. 271
In fact even just if you think about it for a second just Dr. compose and of itself being able to run 272
Ducker compose up on my machine and if I'm on macro win as a doctor desktop. 273
What that means is I could have one of those service services running containers in there be an arm 274
based one and then other ones that are X 86 all in the same network all talking to each other testing 275
apps locally on different architecture types seamlessly like it's just it's kind of like what a world 276
do we live in kind of thing. 277
I think it's cool because it also opens up the world for things like unique kernels which have also 278
traditionally been difficult to kind of work with but have a lot of advantages. 279
And I'm not a unique kernel expert but this is kind of along that path to getting to some more advanced 280
ways of communicating with hardware it's more advanced kernels more secure. 281
Right. 282
So another thing that isn't really part of the announcement but you know your darker images come with 283
the ability to be cryptic graphically signed and a big challenge when you're talking about hardware 284
is cryptographic signing what's running on on hardware. 285
And and that becomes more and more important as we start to do more and more processing at the edge. 286
And it's also the same things that we can do today on servers on a new processor architecture that that 287
that might not have those advantages at X 86 have from the dev ops world but now do so before we hear. 288
I mean how often do we hear of this these camera systems got hacked and all this kind of all that stuff. 289
Yeah. 290
I think I think I think it happens more than we realize. 291
We hear a lot of news and we're like yeah. 292
But I think you know there's a lot of devices in fact. 293
What's interesting is to see devices coming out now like the Google Home which specifically markets 294
as not having a camera in it so that it can't be hacked so that your privacy is protected by not having 295
a camera in your living room whatever. 296
I just recently got a Google home and it's essentially a little tablet with a speaker built in that 297
runs Android and it has lots of things in it. 298
But one thing it doesn't have is a camera because of that that very we've all been trained. 299
Now that thing with a sensor Internet access in my house is potentially hackable and you're right a 300
docker I mean it to me it's like if the app gets hacked the OS can still replace that container much 301
easier than you would have to like flash the firmware on a device to get rid of the hack. 302
Right. 303
So the whole remediation seems a lot easier than me assuming that they didn't break out of the container 304
and all that obviously there's always those risks. 305
But.