I have always been a big fan of Docker. This is very visible if you regularly read this blog. However, I am very disappointed lately how Docker handled the 1.12 release. I like to think of version 1.12 as a great proof of concept that should not have received the amount of attention that it already received. Let’s dive deep into what I found wrong.

First, I do not think a company should market and promote exciting new features that have not been tested well. Every time Docker makes an announcement, the news spreads like a virus to blogs and news sites all over the globe. Tech blogs will basically copy and paste the exact same procedure that Docker discussed into a new blog post as if they were creating original content. This cycle repeats over and over again and becomes annoying because I am seeing the same story a million times. What I hate most about these recent redundant articles is that the features do not work as well as what is written about them.

I was really excited hearing about the new Swarm mode feature and wanted it to work as described because this means that one day I can easily make a Swarm cluster with my four Raspberry Pi’s and have container orchestration, load balancing, automatic failover, multi-host networking, and mesh networking features without any effort. Swarm in v1.12 is very easy to setup versus the predecessor and I wanted to put it in production at home (homeduction). To test Swarm, I setup a few virtual machines using docker-machine on my laptop and went through the Swarm creation process and then began to run into issues when deploying my applications.

An important feature to have in a Swarm cluster is multi-host networking for containers. This allows containers to talk to each other on a virtual network across many hosts running the Docker engine. Multi-host networking is important for containers to communicate with each other such as web application connecting to another container with MySQL. The problem I faced is that none of my containers could communicate across hosts. When it did work sometimes, the mesh networking would not route traffic properly to the host running my container. This means none of my applications worked properly. I went to the Docker forums and many people shared my pain.

It is not wise to explode the Internet and conventions with marketing material about exciting new features that do not work as presented. There are still many bugs in Swarm that need to be fixed before releasing to the general public to have them beta test for you. What is the rush to release? Will it hurt that much to wait a few more weeks or months to do it right and have the product properly working and tested? Yes, we all know Docker is awesome and is trying to play catch up with competitors such as Apcera and Kubernetes, but please take it slow and make Docker great again!

[Edit 8/31/2016]

Tweaked paragraphs to make it more clear that my testing was not done on the Raspberry Pi and done with docker-machine on a laptop.