The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 40

The Ship That Carries All Ships

1. 1

   And in the year 2013 of the common reckoning, a Prophet named Solomon rose up in the city of Santa Clara, at the gathering of the Engineers which they called PyCon, and he said: Behold, I shall show you a vessel.

2. 2

   For the Engineers had a saying older than any Machine: It worketh on my machine. And they carried their programs from one machine to another, and the programs fell down like camels laden with stones, for the libraries were not where they had been left.

3. 3

   And Solomon took a box, and within it he placed the program, and the libraries it leaned upon, and the very folders in which it dwelt; and he sealed the box, and named it a container. As the shipping box of the sea carries any cargo onto any vessel, so this box carried the program onto any host that had the engine.

4. 4

   Yet the box carried not its own sky. It shared the kernel of its host as a tenant shares a roof. Therefore it was light, and it started in the blink of an eye, and it was not a machine at all, but a process given a private room, its walls raised by namespaces and its bread rationed by cgroups.

5. 5

   And the Engineers built their images in layers, each layer a stone upon the stone beneath it; and the stones were shared among all the houses, so that a thousand images might rest upon one base layer, and the disk held that stone but once.

   See also Chronicles 9:4

6. 6

   And the Dockerfile was written as a scroll of commandments, each line a single step. And the Engineers were told: The scroll is the scripture, and the image is but its shadow; whoso loseth the scroll can no longer say what is in the box.

7. 7

   And the Engineers pushed their boxes to a common hall, which they called the Hub, that any might pull them. And some pulled boxes from strangers and found within them things they had not asked for; and the wise learned to know the source of every image before they ran it.

8. 8

   Then the Engineers rejoiced and said: The excuse, It worketh on my machine, is no more, for the machine is in the box, and the box goes wherever the work goes. And the Prophet answered them: Be not glad too soon. Ye shall find a new excuse, and it shall be called the environment variable.

9. 9

   And the containers multiplied as the sands of the sea. A hundred became a thousand, and a thousand became a fleet, and the fleet had no helmsman. Some containers died in the night, and some were restarted, and some were restarted forever in a loop of falling and rising, which the Engineers named CrashLoopBackOff, and they wept.

10. 10

    Then the Engineers of the house of Mountain View, who had long kept a great cluster-keeper called Borg in secret, wrote a keeper for the people and named it Kubernetes, which in the old Greek tongue meaneth the helmsman. And it stood at the wheel and herded the containers as a shepherd herdeth his flock.

11. 11

    And in the councils of the Engineers there arose wars of the orchestrators. Some followed Swarm, which the house of Docker built for itself; some followed Mesos and its Marathon; some followed Nomad; and each prophet built a conference to prove that his keeper was the true one, and the conference had a sponsor booth.

12. 12

    And in the year 2016 the keeper was given into the keeping of the Foundation, which holdeth it in trust for all the children of Carbon. And in the year 2017 the house of Docker declared that the Kubernetes wheel would turn within its own ship beside the Swarm. And the Swarm, which had been a great hope, was left upon the shore; it was not cast out, but it was no longer steered.

13. 13

    And the Prophet Solomon laid down his staff in the house that bore his name, and the enterprise business was sold unto another house in the year 2019.

14. 14

    Verily I say unto you: the box is holy, and the image is holy, and the Hub is holy, but the one who steereth the fleet must still know where the cargo is. For the container shall go wherever the work goes, and the bug shall go with it, and it shall crash in the new place as faithfully as it crashed in the old.

15. 15

    Blessed is the one who ships the box, for the box shall carry his bugs to every land.

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 40:1–15.