Solomon Hykes from the Docker project explains the principles and operations of the Docker project, and how it deals with extreme levels of scale and openness.

1. Open design at large scale

2. The real value of Docker is not technology
It’s getting people to agree on something

3. How active is
Docker?

4. 4854 PRs (Oct 2014, sub-projects not included)

5. 4854 PRs
(Oct 2014, sub-projects not included)
Total Merged Average
days open
Median
days open
Docker, inc 2410 1995 (82%) 7.2 1
Community 2444 1615 (66%) 9.4 1
• Differences are noticeable but reasonable: initial maintainers are by definition
employees. “community” includes the long tail of low-quality patch bombs.
• We want to trend towards zero difference
• The median pull request has been open 1 day which is insane!

6. The Human Stack (c) Damien Duportal
Contributors
Google Red Hat Microsoft Docker,
IBM inc. etc.
Open Design API
Project maintainers
DGAB advice

7. The Human Stack (c) Damien Duportal
Contributors
Google Red Hat Microsoft Docker,
IBM inc. etc.
Open Design API
Project maintainers DGAB advice

8. CONTRIBUTORS
Project maintainers
BDFL
DGAB
daemon.go registry.go
libcontainer/

9. How do we scale this to
10,000 contributors and
dozens of sub-projects?

10. Proposed improvement: PR 9137
(yes, governance changes happen in PRs)
Project maintainers DGAB
BDFL
less important
chief architect chief operator chief maintainer
architects operators core maintainers
subsystem subsystem subsystem subsystem
subsystem subsystem subsystem subsystem

11. 9137
https://github.com/docker/docker/pull/9137
Please give feedback!

12. Human organizations
are programmable.
Bugs can be fixed, scale bottlenecks
removed, inefficient code refactored

13. We can define a new
model for open-source
at large scale

14. Thank you!