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Ask HN: Is anyone not using containers in production nowadays?

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Ask HN: Is anyone not using containers in production nowadays?

#1
Docker and kubernetes are everywhere.

Not every projects needs hot-scalable infrastructure.

Is anyone still using something like Ansible to push changes to VPCs? Are there any updated best practices out there for managing non-container-based deployments? What would a modern non-container deployment of nginx+DB+YOUR_FAVORITE_FRAMEWORK look like?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone not using containers in production nowadays?

#6
OP, is your only experience working with technology companies and trendy startups trying to hit some mega-million valuation?

The real world is a lot more messy than the best practices that tech companies come up with. Go work for some local warehouse or AC repair company's IT departments. They might have some technology for managing inventory or scheduling appointments or billing or any one of a hundred tasks that isn't done in the most modern way.

There's many industries where technology isn't valued or emphasized and that are still using code and some practices from 10-15+ years ago due to financial constraints. And that's fine, as long as it works and is secure. Many times it isn't, but it can work just fine even if it doesn't look modern.

I'd bet the vast majority of websites out there are not using containers today.

I'd bet there's some pretty big and profitable websites out there that probably deploy stuff via uploading a bunch of files via SFTP (or even FTP) and perhaps running some deployment script that's been hacked together a decade ago.

Hell, we talk a lot about the market being consumed by React and languages like Python. But jQuery is still ridiculously widely used. PHP is basically persona non-grata on HN, but its market share among overall websites is still pretty high.

I'm kind of mad that the community here killed codevark's answer because that's an example of the messy world we live in that gives a partial answer to OP's question.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone not using containers in production nowadays?

#7

OP, is your only experience working with technology companies and trendy startups trying to hit some mega-million valuation? The real world is a lot more messy than the best practices that tech companies come up with. Go work for some local warehouse or AC repair company's IT departments. They might have some technology for managing inventory or scheduling appointments or billing or any one of a hundred tasks that is…

I've been in the industry for 20+ years. My opinion is that the extra complexity that comes from containarization is not necessary at many of the early startups. The benefits are not needed and the costs are hard to see but non-trivial.

The companies I worked with either were slowly moving towards containarization, or were already there before I joined. I always thought that it is premature. My pet projects never used it, and I had well-running pipelines, zero-downtime, and 1-click deployments.

I asked the question because I feel that I may be missing something. Perhaps the world moved on and I'm a curmudgeon, screaming at all the container-kids to get off my lawn.

I recently started a little project and realized that I am not aware of what the current best practices around CI/CD are if you want to go down the route of "no containers, for now". I'm also at a point where I may be starting a new bigger project and would like to make sure I am putting in modern infra, but not necessarily pre-building and pushing containers to production.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone not using containers in production nowadays?

#8
post #5

Funny you say that because we don't use containers yet and definitely have no reason to use Kubernetes. However, we are looking at switching to AWS ECS with fargate for our SAAS. If anyone wants to consult, hit me up.

Can you share more about your current setup, and what is the motivating factor for the move to AWS ECS?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone not using containers in production nowadays?

#9
post #3

> Docker and kubernetes are everywhere. I'm willing to bet a dollar not even 1% of deployments use these. The world is a pretty big place.

Would love to hear what the best practices for a new greenfield project, say Django-Postgres-Redis-Nginx, would be if you wanted to avoid containers for some time.
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