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

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

#613
post #314

Docker the tool has been a massive benefit to software development, every now and then I have a moan about the hassle of getting something bootstrapped to run on Docker, but it's still 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. Unfortunately Docker the company appears to be dying, this is the latest in a long line…

Why didn't Docker ever offer managed container hosting? That seems like the obvious logical next step when you create a tool for easy deploys. Instead it's 2023 and we finally get that with Fly.io. I must be missing something obvious, because otherwise I feel like I'm going insane.

They did[1].

It was later shut down.

1: https://venturebeat.com/business/docker-acquires-container-d...

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

#614

Does anybody know whether there could be something like an open/libre container registry? Maybe the cloud native foundation or the linux foundation could provide something like this to prevent vendor lock-ins? I was coincidentially trying out harbor again over the last days, and it seems nice as a managed or self-hosted alternative. [1] after some discussions we probably gonna go with that, because we want to prevent…

It's all open source software. Stupidly simple and easy to host. It's a low value commodity thing without mucb value that anyone can trivially self host. All you need is a docker capable machine (any linux machine basically) and some disk space to host the images. And a bit of operational stuff like monitoring, backups, etc. So there's an argument to be made for using something that's there, convenient, and available…

Yeah, honestly the answer is still Github. I entered this industry in 1998. I remember why people don't like Microsoft. I avoid Windows like the plague and have for many years. But Github has never been anything but good for developers and open source, and that hasn't seemed to change. Microsoft can afford to fund stuff like this for developer goodwill alone, and spends much more than that already for that reason. Its not the greatest model imaginable for the sustainability of open source, but there is absolutely no indication as of yet that it's a really bad one. I mean, who the hell wants to go back to sourceforge, even before it was bought and turned into a cesspool?

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

#615

Does anybody know whether there could be something like an open/libre container registry? Maybe the cloud native foundation or the linux foundation could provide something like this to prevent vendor lock-ins? I was coincidentially trying out harbor again over the last days, and it seems nice as a managed or self-hosted alternative. [1] after some discussions we probably gonna go with that, because we want to prevent…

It's all open source software. Stupidly simple and easy to host. It's a low value commodity thing without mucb value that anyone can trivially self host. All you need is a docker capable machine (any linux machine basically) and some disk space to host the images. And a bit of operational stuff like monitoring, backups, etc. So there's an argument to be made for using something that's there, convenient, and available…

> Stupidly simple and easy to host.

At scale, serving tens of thousands of users? Unfortunately not.

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

#616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why better to have NetBSD + pkgsrc combo for servers.

You misspelled Nixpkgs ;-) I'm kidding, of course, but IIRC pkgsrc (and alikes, such as APT) has a number of limitations, for example a very limited ability to have multiple versions of the same package installed, making it less than optimal replacement. (I believe a lot of people depend on ability to spin up a new version while the old is running, then do the cutover and shut down the old one after it's not is use.)

Capabilities aside, if you're reproducible and source-based, you're gonna survive binary artifact repository outages a lot better than if you're not.

If there were a comparable culling of the Nixpkgs binary cache, pipelines relying on Nix for their packages would be affected in a much less invasive way: they'd see Nix silently fall back to upstream sources, and reproducibly build from source, wherever the caches binary artifacts became unavailable.

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

#617
post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all open source software. Stupidly simple and easy to host. It's a low value commodity thing without mucb value that anyone can trivially self host. All you need is a docker capable machine (any linux machine basically) and some disk space to host the images. And a bit of operational stuff like monitoring, backups, etc. So there's an argument to be made for using something that's there, convenient, and available…

> Stupidly simple and easy to host. At scale, serving tens of thousands of users? Unfortunately not.

If you have that issue, it's a solvable problem. Most companies simply don't and can only dream about that. Why pay until you actually get there?

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

#618

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!

Does Nix have an equivalent of docker-compose yet? nix-shell is amazing for installing binaries, but actually wiring up and running the services doesn't seem like a solved problem. Unless Nix expects a separate tool to do this once binaries are installed, of course.

Yeah, there are basically two native options for managing and configuring services with Nix.

The easiest one is NixOS, and that'll be enough for most people, provided that they're okay using it as the OS for their servers.

The other is Disnix, which is a bit more cumbersome but also more flexible, and works fine for deploying Nix-based software to other systems.

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

#619
post #572

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…

This whole thing is so weird. Why do so many organizations depend on the internet to function? It wasn't too long ago that it was standard practice to vendor your dependencies; that is, dump your dependencies into a vendor/ directory and keep that directory updated and backed up. But now, you all think it's 100% acceptable to just throw your hands up if github is down, or a maven repository is down, or docker hub mak…

> But now, you all think it's 100% acceptable to just

Who is this "all" you're talking to? Seems like most of the responses are suggesting vendoring too.

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

#620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

docker-compose seems necessary only because you have your "official postgres dockerfile" and your self-built "web app dockerfile" (and maybe other things like an ElasticSearch dockerfile) Docker files seem necessary only because... well put it this way, think of a Docker image as "the cached result of a build that just so happened to succeed even though it was entirely likely not to, because Docker builds are NOT det…

except you cant deploy Nix files, and even if you could, better be sure that every employee is using Nix and have the same configuration. The whole point of docker is to make reproducible builds everywhere, not just your computer.

On systems that have the same containerization feature that Docker requires, i.e., Linux systems with recent kernels, you can use nix-bundle¹ or the flakes-based experimental command inspired by it, `nix bundle`² to generate an all-in-one binary that you can run without installing Nix on the target.

1: https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle

2: https://github.com/NixOS/bundlers

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