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Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

blog.alexellis.io

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Re: Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

#231

> Start publishing images to GitHub And when GitHub starts similar shenanigans, move out to where? I am old enough to know the we can't trust BigTech and their unpredictable behaviors. Eventually we need to start a Codeberg like alternative using Prototype funds to be self reliant. 1: https://codeberg.org/ 2: https://prototypefund.de/

We need to use a distributed system instead of a centralised one. Probably built on a source control system that can handle that.

What happened to the old mirror lists? The ones where apt/rpm package repositories tend to be hosted?

Re: Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not as easy nor as simple as docker + docker compose.

You're right, it's both easier and simpler since no daemons are involved. podman-compose has the same command-line interface and has worked ok for me so far (maybe 3 or 4 years at this point).

Podman-compose isn't fully compatible with the new compose spec.

Also I really don't care if docker has a daemon or not, for me it offers feature like auto starting containers without bothering with SystemD, and auto updates using watchtower and the docker socket.

And since podman doesn't have an official distro package repo like docker, you are stuck use whatever old version shipped in your distro without recent improvements, which is important for a very active development project.

Re: Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

#233

As an SRE Manager, this is causing me a hell of a headache this morning. In 30 days a bunch of images we depend on may just disappear. We mostly depend on images from relatively large organizations (`alpine`, `node`, `golang`, etc), so one would want to believe that we'll be fine - they're all either in the open source program or will pay. But I can't hang my hat on that. If those images disappear, we lose the abilit…

Or you could, you know, host a Docker registry and reupload those images to something you control. Worst case scenario, in 30 days, nothing is gone from Docker and you can just spin it down.

Your job as an SRE is not to look at things and go "oh well, nothing we can do lol".

Re: Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

#234

As an SRE Manager, this is causing me a hell of a headache this morning. In 30 days a bunch of images we depend on may just disappear. We mostly depend on images from relatively large organizations (`alpine`, `node`, `golang`, etc), so one would want to believe that we'll be fine - they're all either in the open source program or will pay. But I can't hang my hat on that. If those images disappear, we lose the abilit…

You should be escrowing any Docker images you depend on, I'd have thought.

Re: Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

#235

As an SRE Manager, this is causing me a hell of a headache this morning. In 30 days a bunch of images we depend on may just disappear. We mostly depend on images from relatively large organizations (`alpine`, `node`, `golang`, etc), so one would want to believe that we'll be fine - they're all either in the open source program or will pay. But I can't hang my hat on that. If those images disappear, we lose the abilit…

If your business is depending on these open source projects to exist, shouldn't you be paying them so they can then pay for Docker?

Re: Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not as easy nor as simple as docker + docker compose.

It’s literally OCI compatible, integrates with systemd and LSM, and runs rootless by default. Podman is 100000% better designed on the inside with the same interface on the outside.

Rootless networking is still a mess with no IP source propagation and much slower performance. So for most users docker with userNS-remapping is actually a better choice.

Also systemd integration isn't a plus for me, I don't want to deal with SystemD just to have a container start on startup.

Re: Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

#237

> Start publishing images to GitHub And when GitHub starts similar shenanigans, move out to where? I am old enough to know the we can't trust BigTech and their unpredictable behaviors. Eventually we need to start a Codeberg like alternative using Prototype funds to be self reliant. 1: https://codeberg.org/ 2: https://prototypefund.de/

The economics of hosting an image registry are tough. Just mirroring the npm registry can cost $100s per month in storage for tiny little tarballs.

Hosting GB images in an append-only registry, some of which get published weekly or even daily, will burn an incredible amount of money in storage costs. And that’s before talking about ingress and egress.

There will also be a tonne of engineering costs for managing it, especially if you want to explore compression to push down storage costs. A lot of image layers share a lot of files, if you can store the decompressed tarballs in a chunk store with clever chunking you can probably reduce storage costs by an order of magnitude.

But, at the end of the day, expect costs for this to shoot into the 6-7 digit USD range per month in storage and bandwidth as a lower bound for your community hosted image registry.

Re: Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> worlds better than the old ways of managing dependencies and making sure everyone on a project is aligned on what versions of things are installed. And Nix is worlds better than even this . Imagine!

I’m yet to be entirely sold on that, mostly because I think Nix the language isn’t anywhere near as accessible as Dockerfiles, but I’ll be the first one cheering if Nix does manage to take over.

Completely agree on the complexity criticism, but this interactive tutorial (that literally embeds a full nix interpreter in the browser) went a looooooong way towards making Nix files not just look like arcane incantations to me, and doesn't take very long to do:

https://nixcloud.io/tour/

if at some point you realize "oh... this is just JSON with a different syntax, some shorthands, and anonymous or library functions," you're on the right path

Re: Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Podman is interesting. I like the architecture problems it solves with respect to Docker but the way they went about it was typical big business Red Hat. Dan Walsh, Podman's BDFL it seems, basically stood in front of RHEL / OpenShift customers for years bashing Docker even when a majority of the things he was claiming were less than half baked. RHEL made sly moves like not supporting the Docker runtime, even at a tim…

OTOH, Docker didn't want to support a lot of features that enterprise customers wanted, like self-hosted private registries, because they wanted people using Dockerhub. And wasn't the runtime problems because Docker was very very late to adopting CGroups v2?

Yes cgroupsv2 was a big problem for docker on EL8 for a long time.

Re: Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

#240

As an SRE Manager, this is causing me a hell of a headache this morning. In 30 days a bunch of images we depend on may just disappear. We mostly depend on images from relatively large organizations (`alpine`, `node`, `golang`, etc), so one would want to believe that we'll be fine - they're all either in the open source program or will pay. But I can't hang my hat on that. If those images disappear, we lose the abilit…

The images you mention (alpine, node, golang) are all so-called “Docker Official Images”. Those are all the ones without a slash as the namespace separator in them: https://hub.docker.com/search?q=&type=image&image_filter=off...

They are versioned and reviewed here: https://github.com/docker-library/official-images

I don't expect them to go away.

Disclosure: I maintain two of them (spiped, adminer).

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