As long-time FreeBSD community member Michael Dexter suggests in his recent post, “Docker Done Right,” “FreeBSD just may prove to be the ultimate Docker platform thanks to its 15+ years of containment experience and the unrivaled OpenZFS file system.” Docker is available on FreeBSD as of June, 2015.

Micahel sees Docker as “a sysadmin’s approach to software packaging.”

“The sysadmin has their hands tied,” says Michael, “and can’t modify things above them and below them. So what do you do? You create a shim environment where you make it easy to port applications.”

“As a platform,” he explains, “once the Linux emulation hit 64 bit, something like Docker was a matter of weeks of porting, in spare time, rather than a massive engineering feat.” Michael is passionate about FreeBSD, which, he says, “goes back directly to the CSRG and the BSD project.”

“When you take a platform like that that’s ready for such things (like Docker), it just dropped into place.”

“We’ve had a very clear ports tree, and application management from that perspective, so we’ve been containing applications from ports in jails for a very long time,” he says. He believes users who are lured to the FreeBSD platform and who discover how well it performs with Docker will not want to go back. “Once you spend some time with ZFS you will never want to see another hardware rate card in your life again. Once you do a ZFS send on important data, you’ll never want to use rsync again.”