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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

#681

Post by voytec »

kobalsky wrote: post #536
voytec wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. I had, and still have, my own small business in Poland and I was clear (in writing) that I am planning to visit my main client.

You mentioned both employer and client, are they the same?

Yeah. I treat one-man small business serving mainly one big client to be comparable. On paper it's B2B, in reality it's working for the client and if the client is small business' main source of income, it's pretty much an employment.

Differences, in Poland at least, are that small business owner in this scenario is not protected by employment laws (3-months notice layoff, max 3 months salary-equal damages liability etc) and uses company's (EU)VAT registration number instead of personal social security number equivalent (PESEL number). It eases abroad contract agreements, invoicing and allows serving more clients easily. Company existence can also be validated on EU VIES[1] website quickly.

In the visa case, I have of course used the "paper" phrasing as in reality I was, and am, only employed by my own small business.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/#/vat-validation

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

#682

Post by 6nf »

jon-wood wrote: post #13

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…

Docker was always ‘oh we have too many moving parts in the deployment pipeline, let’s add Yet Another Thing. That will fix it’ It never fixed anything.

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

#683

Post by thrashh »

You know what I love about Java’s library ecosystem?

You configure your project to use the de-facto ones…

OR you configure your project (not your system’s user profile!) to use your own internal registry/repo

And all the repo software supports pull-through from every other repo, so you cache all your dependencies however you want and have full control over everything.

Why does pretty much no other ecosystem do this?

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

#684

Post by maxyurk »

fbdab103 wrote: post #669
flyinghamster wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be sure to archive your development tools as well, just in case that rug gets pulled. You don't want to be in the position that you need v3.1415927 of FooWare X++ because version 4 dropped support for BazQuux™, only to find that it's no longer downloadable at any price.

I do not know if Nix will be the answer, but I really hope it or a successor drags us to fully explicit and reproducible builds.

for reproducing a build you need at the least the source and the tools to build it which might not be available as well

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

#685

Post by Havoc »

millerm wrote: post #257

I suppose BitTorrent for Images should be a thing (again?) Discussions of decentralization and redundancy always come up in software/system design and development, but we seem to always gravitate to bottlenecks and full dependency on single entities for the tools we "need".

Good point. A dual system would be ideal. http to ensure coverage, bt to achieve network effects on the popular images.

Presumably a few - nginx and what not - have a high %

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

#686

Post by friendzis »

tetrep wrote: post #567
dbingham wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can't go NIH for everything. If we do that we're back to baremetal in our own datacenters and that's expensive and (comparatively) low velocity. We have to pick and choose our dependencies and take the trade off of risk for velocity. This is the tradeoff we made with the move to cloud. We run our workloads on AWS, GCP or Azure, use DataDog or New Relic for monitoring, use Github or GitLab for repos and pipelines,…

It's less NIH and more "cache your dependencies." Details will very greatly depending on what your tech stack looks like, if you're lucky you can just inline a cache. I know Artifactory is a relatively general commercial solution although I can't speak personally about it. If you can't easily use an existing caching solution, then the only NIH you need to do is copying files that your build system downloads. I know m…

> I don't know if more opaque systems exist that wouldn't give you any access like that

As long as there is there is "server reimplementation", i.e. private registries available, one can always hack together a solution out of self signed CA, DNS and routing to replace "the server" with local registry.

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

#687

Post by pxc »

alerighi wrote: post #563
jon-wood wrote: post #13

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…

To me is the opposite, Docker promotes bad software development practices that in the end will hurt you. In fact most of the time when you hear that you need Docker to run a software is because that software is so badly written that installing it on a system is too much complex. Another bad use of Docker that I've seen is because people cannot figure out how to write systemd units, that is damn simple (just spend a d…

> To me is the opposite, Docker promotes bad software development practices that in the end will hurt you. In fact most of the time when you hear that you need Docker to run a software is because that software is so badly written that installing it on a system is too much complex.

I think one reason you may be seeing downvotes here is that you have specific projects in mind, and without you naming them, others who haven't used such projects don't see how real the phenomenon is.

I was recently helping a friend work through some Nix configuration and he told me about a couple of different projects he used where deploying the software any way other than via Docker was treated as either officially or de facto unsupported. In some cases, dependencies are not even exhaustively named in the documentation. When users ask questions in community channels (often on Discord) about what the software's requirements are, they are (at least sometimes) directed to just use the pre-baked Docker images instead of receiving real answers to their questions.

This is second-hand info for me. I don't know how bad it really is, or how common, either. But that kind of thing a absolutely screams to me, too, 'very few of us actually know how this thing works'.

Still, sharing that sentiment without giving a specific account of software that you've seen fall into this trap is likely to be dismissed and downvoted. Maybe it would be helpful to give some concrete examples of what you brought all that to mind for you.

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

#688

Post by friendzis »

heleninboodler wrote: post #619
caeril wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Who is this "all" you're talking to?

This is a thread under most updooted comment. Generally it is safe to assume that top comment more or less reflects general sentiment

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

#689

Post by _cenw »

TimWolla wrote: post #240
dbingham wrote: post #230

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).

One should get in the habit of prefixing them with docker.io/library through, simply because docker's claim on being the default namespace is unacceptable (and also not true on RHEL-adjacent distros)

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

#690

Post by sofixa »

dralley wrote: post #442
sofixa wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this and many other things, Red Hat eventually wins because they are more open-source friendly and because they hire better developers who make better engineering decisions. We must be talking about a different Red Hat here. Podman, with breaking changes in every version, that is supposedly feature and CLI complete with Docker, but isn't actually, is winning because it's more open source friendly or better techn…

>Or systemd, written in a memory unsafe language (yes, that is a problem for something so critical and was already exploited at least a couple of times) What memory safe language 1) existed in 2010 and 2) is thoroughly portable to every architecture people commonly run Linux on and 3) is suitable for software as low-level as the init? Rust is an option now but it wasn't back then. And Rust is being evaluated now, eve…

Go, although with it's GC it's debatable to what extent it's suitable for very low level software.

And honestly the language choice was only the tip of the iceberg, it took years of people adapting before systemd became usable. And it still doesn't handle circular dependencies better than arbitrarily which is ridiculous, literally one of it's main jobs is to handle dependencies.

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