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Docker Considered Harmful (2016)

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Re: Docker Considered Harmful (2016)

#11

Post by cremp »

bbrunner wrote: post #6

This feels a bit like "Why use Dropbox when rsync exists?" type of argument. Sure, you can do everything docker does with shell scripts, and you've been able to for decades, but many people didn't, because it was "complicated". There is often a huge amount of value in simplifying things, even if it means losing some of the power and the end result being objectively worse.

Docker has reached the point that it is complicated. A lot of people never did cgroups just because it is lower, starting to touch kernel stuff. Few people want to go there.

Docker is one of those things that you can install and run; it takes a small amount of time to get running. As you said, value in simplifying things.

That being said... Anyone who takes the stance that containers are better than X/Y/Z are just showing that they don't have the drive to get into the why of how it all works.

Any argument of 'it saves overhead' can take that argument and run with it until the cows come home; but they don't understand that the overhead is all relative. As a programmer; I stopped caring about overhead and starting worrying about the fact that people will break my stuff, I just need to stop them from breaking other things using that as the foothold.

Re: Docker Considered Harmful (2016)

#12

Post by andrewguenther »

Like any hyped up technology, Docker gets pitched as an "easy, works out of the box, secure by default solution" but it is almost anything but. But also like any technology, if you take the time to really understand what it is doing and what problems it can solve for you, it can be really awesome to work with.

Every "Docker Considered Harmful" post I've read basically boils down to "Why would you use Docker if you can use the 10 technologies it wraps around and manage them yourself instead?" Why would I want to do that if I don't have to? Docker wraps these things well. There are weird defaults and there are some popular patterns in the community that are a bit backwards, but you have the power to work around it. Don't run your containers as root and run a dumb init process in your container. That's half of the posts complaints gone right there. Complaining about defaults is one thing, claiming that bad defaults make a technology "harmful" is just lazy.

Re: Docker Considered Harmful (2016)

#14

Post by lolsal »

The biggest complaint that I have is that Docker is a huge leaky abstraction. I end up having to mess with a lot of stuff in order to get docker, docker-compose, etc. all working Just Right®. It saves time, but it's very, very leaky, which makes it a bit of a minefield (which you can learn to navigate).

Re: Docker Considered Harmful (2016)

#15

Post by ex3ndr »

So i should learn every possible combination of init system to convert some random launch scripts from the internet to run in my particular setup? Instead of `docker run postgres`? Or how i should do the same in K8s? Invent some packaging format? Wait a second.. aren't all linux packaging formats are overly complicated and are really hard to maintain comparing to docker images? What if some package work only on some ridiculous version of linux?

Re: Docker Considered Harmful (2016)

#16

Post by guildencrantz42 »

XVincentX wrote: post #7

In theory he's totally right. In practice Docker is bringing all these things in a unified and standard tools — basically bringing such technology to the "masses". If you can craft your own system, feel free to move forward with that.

The power of docker became clear to me when I handed basic instructions to our web devs and watched it just work. The tooling was docker's secret sauce, nothing more. And, yes, you still need somebody who knows what the system is actually doing keeping an eye on things; you can't just hand a bunch of devs docker and fire your ops team.

Re: Docker Considered Harmful (2016)

#17

Post by bbrunner »

cremp wrote: post #11
bbrunner wrote: post #6

This feels a bit like "Why use Dropbox when rsync exists?" type of argument. Sure, you can do everything docker does with shell scripts, and you've been able to for decades, but many people didn't, because it was "complicated". There is often a huge amount of value in simplifying things, even if it means losing some of the power and the end result being objectively worse.

Docker has reached the point that it is complicated. A lot of people never did cgroups just because it is lower, starting to touch kernel stuff. Few people want to go there. Docker is one of those things that you can install and run; it takes a small amount of time to get running. As you said, value in simplifying things. That being said... Anyone who takes the stance that containers are better than X/Y/Z are just sh…

I think the base use case of Docker is still relatively simple, although like all things it has gotten to the point where, if you want to dig deep, you definitely can get way into the weeds, especially when you start talking about networking, orchestration, composing containers, and all of the tooling that now exists on top of Docker.

When you choose Docker/containers, you make a choice to expose yourself to a distinct class of problems. You make a tradeoff of saving overhead in exchange for opening up other issues. This isn't an absolute good or bad thing, as sometimes shaving off overhead is worth it even if your failure case becomes much worse.

I will say that, in general, I've found a lot people don't make this type of consideration and just go with a dogma of "Just use {technology} because it's popular".

Re: Docker Considered Harmful (2016)

#19

Post by tormeh »

ohiovr wrote: post #2

I'm not at all convinced that reams and reams of shell scripts to deploy complex applications is a good idea. But by all means go for it if you think that is the way to go.

This. Save me from shellscript. I guess it's possible to write good/tolerable shellscript, but most of it is garbage. Obfuscated disasters waiting to happen.
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