Having droned on a little the other day about duplication in Stackanetes (in hindsight, I had intended to make a “it’s turtles all the way down” type jibe), I’ve been delighted to read lots of other people spouting the same opinion – nothing quite so gratifying as confirmation bias.

Massimo has it absolutely right when he describes container scheduling as an incestuous orgy (actually, he didn’t, I just did, but I think that was roughly his point). What is most specifically obvious is the fact that while there is a lot of duplication, there isn’t much agreement about the hierarchy of abstraction: a number of projects have started laying claim to be the lowest level above containers.

It comes back to this; deploying PaaS (such as Cloudfoundry, which I try to hard to like but seems to end up disappointing) is still way too hard. Even deploying IaaS is too hard – the OpenStack distros are still a complete mess. But while the higher level abstractions are fighting it out for attention, the people writing tools at a lower level are busy making little incremental improvements and trying to subsume new functionality – witness Docker Swarm – they’re spreading out horizontally instead of doing one thing well and creating a platform.

I don’t think it’s going to take five years to sort out, but I also don’t think the winner is playing the game yet. Someone is going to come along and make this stuff simple, and they’re going to spread like wildfire when they do it.