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Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?

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Re: Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?

#101

Post by thinkingkong »

Osiris wrote: post #91
thinkingkong wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dependencies can change out from underneath you transparently unless you pin everything all the way down the stack. Upstream docker images for example are an easy to understand vector of change. The deb packages can all change minor versions between runs, the npm packages (for example) can change their contents without making a version bump. Theres tons of implicit trust with all these tools, build wise.

npm packages can change without a version change? Can you explain this? npm doesn't allow you to delete any published versions (you can only deprecate them). You aren't allowed to publish a version that's already been published. Even when there have been malicious packages published the solution has been to publish newer versions of the package with the old code. There's no way to delete the malicious package (maybe…

Sorry, without a minor version change. You can easily publish a patch version and most people don't pin that part of their dependency.

Re: Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?

#102

Post by claytonjy »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #73
claytonjy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what languages do you use in this way? this sounds a lot easier and more natural for C than python

C++ for the most part. I don’t use python much but I don’t know why it wouldn’t be possible build it statically and package your entire dependency set into a single directory.

It's certainly possible in python, and there's a handful of tools/approaches, but the last one I used, PEX, left me scarred. It's certainly a much less common or simple approach then copying a venv into a docker container.

Re: Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?

#103

Post by SQueeeeeL »

disintegore wrote: post #62
smilliken wrote: post #35

My company runs without containers. We process petabytes of data monthly, thousands of CPU cores, hundreds of different types of data pipelines running continously, etc etc. Definitely a distributed system with lots of applications and databases. We use Nix for reproducible builds and deployments. Containers only give reproducible deployments, not builds, so they would be a step down. The reason that's important is t…

I asked the question without context because I didn't want to fire the thread off in the wrong direction but I suppose in a comment chain it's fine. For what it's worth we do use containers and K8s heavily at my current job. I know that there are quite a few people opposed to the state of containers and the technologies revolving around them. I don't think the arguments they present are bad. [Attacking the premise](…

>So essentially I'm interesting in knowing how people find ways to reproduce the value these technologies offer, what they instead rely on, which things they leave on the table

Decades of work typically. That or just standard parallel deployments, most things Docker is good at would take the average developer many unnecessary hours to reproduce.

Re: Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?

#104

Post by smilliken »

ixxie wrote: post #63
smilliken wrote: post #35

My company runs without containers. We process petabytes of data monthly, thousands of CPU cores, hundreds of different types of data pipelines running continously, etc etc. Definitely a distributed system with lots of applications and databases. We use Nix for reproducible builds and deployments. Containers only give reproducible deployments, not builds, so they would be a step down. The reason that's important is t…

I would love to hear more about your architecture and deployment... do your services run as NixOS modules? Are you using NixOps or Morph or something else? How does your world look like without K8s and Containers?

For the first 6 years of using Nix, it was depoyed on Ubuntu. We recently migrated to NixOS. NixOS is fantastic for other reasons that are similar but separate from Nix as a package manager/build system.

It's easier to incrementally switch to Nix first then NixOS later.

We don't use systemd services for our code. We only use NixOS as an operating system, not for application layer. Our code works just the same on any linux distribution, or even macos minus linux-only stuff. That way we don't need to insist that everyone uses the same OS for development, and no one is forced into VMs. Everything can be run and tested locally.

Re: Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?

#105

Post by smilliken »

sideway wrote: post #75
smilliken wrote: post #35

My company runs without containers. We process petabytes of data monthly, thousands of CPU cores, hundreds of different types of data pipelines running continously, etc etc. Definitely a distributed system with lots of applications and databases. We use Nix for reproducible builds and deployments. Containers only give reproducible deployments, not builds, so they would be a step down. The reason that's important is t…

Out of curiosity, what industry is your company in?

Details in bio.

Re: Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?

#106

Post by twistedcheeslet »

maxk42 wrote: post #30
tailspin2019 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in the process of moving to exactly this approach. I’ve been trying to pick the right Linux distro to base my images on. Ubuntu Server is the low effort route but a bit big to redeploy constantly. I’ve also been looking at the possibility of using Alpine Linux which feels like a better fit but a bit more tweaking needed for compatibility across cloud providers. Unikernels are also interesting but I think that mig…

Ubuntu is too heavy. Try CentOS.

How so? Doesn't CentOS share a lot of the same issues as Ubuntu? Legitimate question.

Re: Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?

#109

Post by Thaxll »

cj wrote: post #95
Thaxll wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, you spent probably a lot of time on things that were granted elsewhere and while the rest of the world is improving on those tech you keep your home grown solution that is harder and harder to maintain. Plus the knowledge that is not transferable. > Containers only give reproducible deployments, not builds, so they would be a step down. This is not true, if you use a docker image A with specific version…

> the rest of the world is improving on those tech Does that matter if the current stack works just fine? Imagine someone who built a calculator app with jQuery javascript 10 years ago, and all it does is add and subtract numbers. You could spend time porting it to Ember, and then migrating to Angular, and then porting it to React, and then porting it to React with SSR and hooks. If the calculator app worked with 15…

At some point you just don't want to re-invent the wheel, reminds me a lot of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here
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