Bootstrapping the open-source Sandbox on top of Docker
Published in 2013, this chronicle by @nigma details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 40 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 15 comments
I think this is pretty cool.
As a front end developer I would like to see this mature into a project which "makes my life easier", and currently, one of the biggest pains, I think is setting up a nginx or apache project with the right WSGI directives.
What I would love to see this develop into is a way to get my code pretty much straight from my IDE to a server of my own (whether hardware or virtual). I know it is very limited in deployment features right now, but I can pretty much rely on Docker to do that. e.g. "sandbox build /folder"; docker push dhrp/folder; ... ssh to my server ... docker run dhrp/folder. Done!
Two things are still missing here: * Some kind of proxy with virtualhosts to map port 80 to my container * A default run command for container committed by sandbox
This sounds like the beginning of something very cool, especially if they can add in the automatic deployment of non-code services and credentialing, which really streamline their service. The idea of running my own sandbox host on a Ubuntu image with equal ease of deployment vs. using their hosting service is appealing.
That being said, as impressive as this progress is, there's still some distance to cover. Not to be a hater, but docker+sandbox still doesn't equal their old Sandbox service "flavor". Minimal configuration is the primary allure of, not just dotCloud, but the PaaS ecosystem as a whole. Had they waited until these projects reached maturity before sunsetting their Sandbox service, I might still be deploying my whole stack to dotCloud.
Can someone give me a rundown on the general idea of Docker? I'm a programmer, don't do much server/linux work (OS X is my OS), so I'm not quite understanding.
What does this mean? Someone sets up an application with necessary dependencies, everything ready to go and creates a container out of it which can run on any linux kernel?