Docker's Second Death • Hacker News Board

Re: Docker's Second Death

#81

Post by pm90 » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 7:52 PM UTC

zapita wrote: post #45

I don’t understand all the drama. I remember when everyone complained that docker was too monolithic and controlled by one company. In response they spun out a spec (OCI), an implementation of that spec (runc), then their entire freaking runtime (containerd). They focused on making Docker more of a developer tool with Docker for Mac and Windows. Kubernetes continues to use OCI, runc and containerd - so basically the…

I agree with you.

Fact: Docker is insanely popular with devs but Docker Inc. is struggling as a company. Devs have invested a lot on the platform and entire production systems and deployment pipelines use it.

k8s announces "we're no longer supporting docker shim!" and what most devs heard is "k8s is moving off from docker (which we know has been struggling for a while)! Fuuuuuccckkkk what do we need to do??" and panicked. This is the source of the drama, and we're going to see many "takes" on it. Its just the way the blogging ecosystem works.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#82

Post by dijit » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 7:52 PM UTC

loriverkutya wrote: post #36

papito wrote: post #30

Kubernetes is and will be a solution to a problem most organizations don't have.

Like scaling and fault tolerance? :)

Kubernetes adds some nice stuff but “scaling” and “fault tolerance” can be achieved very easily without it.

Kubernetes is great because it’s a very standard way to interact with computers. Doesn’t matter really if it’s google cloud, on prem, AWS or whatever, it is the same.

The idea being that it abstracts away a lot of the toil work of ops, with the very obvious caveat that you don’t know what the sausage factory is doing.

I’m pretty kubernetes neutral, some of the concepts are great and deserve replication. (Kube-dns + etcd!, sidecars, scheduling to a cluster)

Some are pitfalls that might cost a lot of people a lot of time in the future. (Networking and storage abstractions being prominent examples)

But as with everything, it’s pros and cons, the complexity being a pretty large con in my personal opinion. I say this as a person who is currently converting a lot of stuff to kubernetes because it solves some particular problems we have really well.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#83

Post by brainzap » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 7:53 PM UTC

hmottestad wrote: post #12

I enjoyed the following: > Though it [Docker] does live on strongly within CI/CD ecosystems and, ostensibly, the inner loop of development thanks to the de facto standard Dockerfile. Docker will still live on for both Windows and Mac developers. As a platform for running production code it might be dead or dying, but as an ecosystem and a development tool it will continue to live and probably thrive. Docker is still…

I wish we could replace Dockerfiles already with a format that allows for fine grained layer control.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#84

Post by joana035 » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 7:55 PM UTC

TuringNYC wrote: post #65

The article and some of the comments are a strange take. There is a place for docker. There is a place for Kubernetes. They dont have much overlap in my mind. If I want to run an elastic production system with many components, and scale each component independently, i'd use Kubernetes. ...But if I want to run a Jupyter+PyTorch stack easily w/o wasting half a day on CUDA library dependency issues, I would use Docker w…

> 2. Ingress Controller hell

> 2b. Ingress Controller route/path/url annotation hell...

Sorry, but that is no hard at all and I can't imagine why you compare it to "hell". It is literally less than 20 lines to define an ingress object.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#85

Post by nobleach » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 7:55 PM UTC

hacknat wrote: post #51

hmottestad wrote: post #12

I enjoyed the following: > Though it [Docker] does live on strongly within CI/CD ecosystems and, ostensibly, the inner loop of development thanks to the de facto standard Dockerfile. Docker will still live on for both Windows and Mac developers. As a platform for running production code it might be dead or dying, but as an ecosystem and a development tool it will continue to live and probably thrive. Docker is still…

There’s no need for them to live on. There are open source alternatives that mimic Docker exactly. In fact on Fedora[1] the “docker” cli command is actually buildah and podman (you actually can’t install Docker on Fedora anymore - I genuinely haven’t noticed a difference). The commands are exactly the same right down to the command starting with the word “docker”. I don’t wish them ill, but literally everything has b…

Are you absolutely certain? I had to hack around a bit but I got it running just fine: https://ibb.co/X7dpt7g

Re: Docker's Second Death

#86

Post by musicale » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 7:56 PM UTC

> With all the years of bloat baked into the platform, it’s really just a matter of time before other areas to the left of the platform shed the debt of the Docker daemon

Yes!

Re: Docker's Second Death

#87

Post by santoshalper » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 7:57 PM UTC

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #62

hmottestad wrote: post #12

I enjoyed the following: > Though it [Docker] does live on strongly within CI/CD ecosystems and, ostensibly, the inner loop of development thanks to the de facto standard Dockerfile. Docker will still live on for both Windows and Mac developers. As a platform for running production code it might be dead or dying, but as an ecosystem and a development tool it will continue to live and probably thrive. Docker is still…

A bigger issue is the fact that they were not able to become a unicorn despite having a tremendously popular product. It means there is no money in development tools innovation. This is not a good thing for the software community as it means all tooling innovation will only done and controlled by the FAANGs.

I don't think that's a good read on the situation. I think a better analysis is that there is no money being what amounts to a facade on top of an operating system/kernel capability. All the real novelty and challenge to containers is in the OS itself. Everything else is more or less ease of use, which is important but relatively easy to replicate. In the span of 5 years or so, Docker went from being critical glue code to cruft.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#88

Post by musicale » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 7:57 PM UTC

alexellisuk wrote: post #38

hmottestad wrote: post #12

I enjoyed the following: > Though it [Docker] does live on strongly within CI/CD ecosystems and, ostensibly, the inner loop of development thanks to the de facto standard Dockerfile. Docker will still live on for both Windows and Mac developers. As a platform for running production code it might be dead or dying, but as an ecosystem and a development tool it will continue to live and probably thrive. Docker is still…

Take this post with a hint of bias as it's written by a Red Hat'er - if you ask an employee what the "next thing" is, I wouldn't be surprised to hear "podman" (which is an opinionated docker clone) The number of Docker Desktop installations and the popularity of local Kubernetes tools (think KinD, k3d) show that "Docker got boring" which is an aspiration for infrastructure tooling.

> Red Hat'er

Hat'ers gonna Hat.

(disclaimer: author does not actually work for Red Hat.)

Re: Docker's Second Death

#89

Post by benjaminwootton » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 7:59 PM UTC

andrewguenther wrote: post #7

Docker Inc's antagonistic attitude towards Red Hat and personal attacks on their engineers was the beginning of the end for them. The people who really headlined those attacks are now gone, but the damage was done. Docker made it clear from the beginning they had no desire to be part of a community and now the community is leaving them behind. Good riddance.

Yeah. They were massively arrogant as a company and set of individuals.

They threw me off the Docker Captains programme for saying that Rancher was a good product. Hilarious!

Re: Docker's Second Death

#90

Post by tariqislam_ » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 8:00 PM UTC

raesene9 wrote: post #48

To me this article conflates the removal of a piece of legacy hard-coding (dockershim) with the overall death of Docker. That removal doesn't mean that Docker won't be used as part of Kubernetes clusters any more, Docker/Mirantis have committed to creating a CRI plugin for Docker. But realistically Docker the product is primarily a developer tool and I don't see that going away. Docker for Windows/Mac is the easiest…

Author here. Thanks for your comment! I struggled with this as well. I agree that I might be conflating things a bit, but I did try to contextualize the slow but gradual move away from all things docker with the fate of the company, starting with the platform wars and resulting in the runtime deprecation. I think a lot of what happened came about because Docker took on Kubernetes with Swarm and lost.