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Docker's Second Death

tariqislam.com

91–100 of 286 posts

Re: Docker's Second Death

#91

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.

Podman would be next big thing if: 1. they make a package like docker ob mac where you dont have to fiddle with manually starting vms. An environment where using docker feels native 2. When they start the vm to run podman they will use qemu on arm to simulate an x86 machine and run x86 containers

The second one will be a huge step forward as docker will not be able to do this for a long time as they use the mac hypervisor which can‘t run x86 vms. Podman would enable again prod/dev comparability which may work for redhat to more people switching to podman even for their production systems.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#92

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…

Of course but you’re forgetting that Docker is a commercial organization as well. If not for large scale container orchestration in the cloud, how can they add value that’s worth paying considerable $ for?

Re: Docker's Second Death

#93

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…

> Docker for Windows/Mac is the easiest way to use containers

This is depressing.

Even more depressing is that macOS still doesn't seem to have native containers. (Correct me if I'm wrong - perhaps the sandboxing system can be used as a container system including virtual network interfaces attached to process groups?)

Docker images depend on Linux which means "Docker" on macOS runs in a Linux VM. Presumably docker for Windows could use WSL.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#94
post #51

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…

Podman is 1:1 compatible for running hello world. Your mileage in real projects will vary.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#95
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After they released local kubernetes support for the docker mac client, I've stopped using docker swarm completely. Although to be fair, I didn't use it all that frequently anyways. If your language runtime supports testcontainers ( https://www.testcontainers.org/ ) I would strongly suggest using that over docker compose. Docker compose is so lacking in features that I would just write bash scripts to setup/tear down…

What features do you find missing in compose?

https://docs.docker.com/compose/startup-order/

I see that they now recommend some workarounds to fix this issue, where I want to ensure that dependencies are running before spinning up my app. Usually, this is in the context of integration tests. The inability to support this "natively" makes the integration tests somewhat flaky and unreliable.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#96

I feel like I'm missing some key insight here. To me, the tl;dr of this post is: Kubernetes removed the need for Docker just to run container images in a k8s cluster, ergo, Docker is dead. But Kubernetes is super complicated . The author seems to assume that everybody wants to run everything in Kubernetes, but if I want to run some backend on some server (or maybe on a few servers), then it feels like extreme overkil…

From my experience, it's getting easier to set up Kubernetes with things like OKD (open source OpenShift) or Rancher... but it'll still take you days or weeks (or months in my case). And the organisations that I've heard of in Norway that have actually had success have also had a team of devops people to both set it up and keep it running.

Yeah if you have experience with it you can set up OKD/OpenShift in a few days, but IME no K8s distros are truly "set it and forget it." Everyone needs a "platform" or "kubernetes" team. In a small company it doesn't have to an exclusively K8s team (the can have other responsibilities) but someone will need to watch over and maintain the cluster.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#97

I feel like I'm missing some key insight here. To me, the tl;dr of this post is: Kubernetes removed the need for Docker just to run container images in a k8s cluster, ergo, Docker is dead. But Kubernetes is super complicated . The author seems to assume that everybody wants to run everything in Kubernetes, but if I want to run some backend on some server (or maybe on a few servers), then it feels like extreme overkil…

From my experience, it's getting easier to set up Kubernetes with things like OKD (open source OpenShift) or Rancher... but it'll still take you days or weeks (or months in my case). And the organisations that I've heard of in Norway that have actually had success have also had a team of devops people to both set it up and keep it running.

Was it security that was the wrench?

Anytime I hear people nuh-uhh someone saying "X is complicated", the difference is often someone having to deal with security and someone getting to deploy with more lax considerations.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#98
post #6

So, what's the better business model for a low-level piece of infrastructure like Docker?

Really, there is none. After reading through so many of these types of threads, I'm convinced there is no sustainable business model for open source infrastructure. The best bet would be to build proprietary paid services on top of the open source infrastructure. See Laravel's projects.

This seems at odds with the multiple open source kubernetes distributions on the market. The problem isn't that Docker is open source infrastructure, the issue was that it remained too low-level as a container daemon, didn't manage to build a large community around swarm, and then were really late to embrace kubernetes.

There easily could have been an alternate history where Docker Inc was the first one out of the gate with an enterprise kubernetes distribution, been a positive part of the community, and been a success.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#99
post #94
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Podman is 1:1 compatible for running hello world. Your mileage in real projects will vary.

podman in podman doesn't seem to work. that's a showstopper for a lot of work.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

That facade enabled millions to have easy access to that particular kernel feature. BSD jail's have been around for decades without mass adoption.
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