Live data from Hacker News

What has Docker become?

tuananh.net

191–200 of 286 posts

Re: What has Docker become?

#192
post #18

Honestly I reach for podman or `nix develop` any chance I get. What is the edge that docker provides these days?

> What is the edge that docker provides these days?

hub.docker.com mainly, the centralized docker registry. A bit like Github, there are plenty of alternatives. But that's where you find most people pushing their containers.

And then there is Docker Desktop which a lot of users seem to like.

I switched to colima myself recently (on a mac). I think people overthink all this stuff a bit. Colima doesn't have a UI; but that's fine for me. I mainly use it to run stuff from the command line or from scripts. I wasn't using the Docker Desktop UI very much either.

Colima is a simple wrapper around Lima, which is a simple wrapper around qemu or Apple's virtualization layer. The resulting vm runs a simple Linux distribution with some file mounts and network tunneling to give you a similar experience as Docker Desktop. Which does exactly the same thing in the end of course.

Linux runs containers just fine. The main thing you need for containerization is a Linux kernel. People have actually hacked together docker alternatives with just bash and namespaces. I used a plain qemu vm for a while with the docker socket pointing to an ssh tunnel on my mac. Works amazingly well but it has some limitations. Colima is easier to manage.

People have mentioned several of the other alternatives already. They all can work with the same command line tooling. If you need a UI, colima is probably too barebones. But otherwise, things like IDEs and other tools work (e.g. lazydocker, vs code, intellij, etc.) just fine with it. So the added value of extra UI is limited to me at least.

I think the container runtime inside the vm (podman, containerd, whatever) is mostly not that relevant for developers. It's a bit of an implementation detail. As long as docker and docker compose work on the command line, I'm happy.

Re: What has Docker become?

#193
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you manage your containers in podman declaratively? I tried to substitute docker-compose with Podman and Quadlets on a test server the other day, but was shocked how badly described the overall concept is. Most materials I found glimpsed through ability to run it as root/user and how different that is in configuration, and repeated the same 4-6 commands mantra. Spent a few hours on it and just... failed to run…

quadlets fully depend on systemd doing its work. So, assuming you are running rootless, if you change your quadlets, you will need systemctl --user daemon-reload to let systemd ingest the changes. And, if you have configured to start your container on boot, then still you have to start the container by hand, as you typically won't reboot during development. If you have multiple containers, it might be easiest to have…

yeah, that's exactly what every tutorial says. And I know systemd more or less, daemon-reload is no stranger to me.

That was not sufficient. Both for global o user setup.

Re: What has Docker become?

#194
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes :) We heard the feedback that we should pick a lane between CI and AI agents. We're refocusing on CI. We're making Dagger faster, simpler to adopt. We're also building a complete CI stack that is native to Dagger. The end-to-end integration allows us to do very magical things that traditional CI products cannot match. We're looking for beta testers! Email me at solomon@dagger.io

Really happy to hear this. I was tinkering with Dagger soon before the pivot to AI, and assumed this would not be solving my CI woes anytime soon. Focusing on CI would still enable the AI stuff too! But my use case is CI, no AI.

Exactly. The LLM primitives will remain - we were careful to never compromise the modular, lego-like design of the system. But now we have clarity on the primary use case.

Thanks for giving us another chance! Come say hi on our discord, if you ever want to ask questions or discuss your use case. We have a friendly group of CI nerds who love to help.

Re: What has Docker become?

#195
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you manage your containers in podman declaratively? I tried to substitute docker-compose with Podman and Quadlets on a test server the other day, but was shocked how badly described the overall concept is. Most materials I found glimpsed through ability to run it as root/user and how different that is in configuration, and repeated the same 4-6 commands mantra. Spent a few hours on it and just... failed to run…

This has also been my experience, I'm used to using compose everywhere. I like the declarative file - tried podman and I found the documentation around the concept so scarce and all related to running things as non-root instead of telling me how my docker-compose becomes podman-compose. Still using docker everywhere because of that. Docker swarm mode has also worked wonders as an evolution to my compose files.

I know podman-compose, have some homelab services running on it for a few years, but honestly found multiple ones that failed. It's far from drop-in replacement.

Re: What has Docker become?

#196

"The problem is that Docker the technology became so successful that Docker the company struggled to monetize it. When your core product becomes commoditized and open source, you need to find new ways to add value." No, everything was already open source, other had done it before too, they just made it in a way a lot of "normal" users could start with it, then they waited too long and others created better/their own…

I joined them after they were clearly in decline and half of the office was empty. Contrary to some of the comments here, there were enterprise products (Docker EE, private registry, orchestration) and a very large sales team.

There were also a lot of talented, well-paid engineers working on open source side projects with no business value. It just wasn't a very well-run company. You can't take on half a billion dollars in VC just to sell small enterprise support contracts.

Re: What has Docker become?

#197
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The podman kube support? It provides similar functionality as docker-compose, using a yaml file which is a subset of the Kubernetes pod definition syntax. Then you can just create a few line systemd unit definition, and it integrates as a normal systemd unit, with logs visible via journalctl etc.

This seems to be the way. Short of weeding through the docs, I found the "Play with Kube using Podman" talk on DevConfs YouTube channel helpful.

I will be honest: that is even more confusing :)

> Note: The kube commands in podman focus on simplifying the process of moving containers from podman to a Kubernetes environment and from a Kubernetes environment back to podman.

I'll give it a try, but I'm starting to understand why there is so little use of podman among amateurs.

Re: What has Docker become?

#198
post #35

What I hate about docker and other such solutions is that I cannot install it as nonroot user, and that it keeps images between users in a database. I want to move things around using mv and cp, and not have another management layer that I need to be aware of and that can end up in an inconsistent state.

> What I hate about docker and other such solutions is that I cannot install it as nonroot user There's a rootless [0] option, but that does require some sysadmin setup on the host to make it possible. That's a Linux kernel limitation on all container tooling, not a limitation of Docker. > and that it keeps images between users in a database. Not a traditional database, but content addressable filesystem layers, comm…

If I install podman on my Linux machine, it's rootless by default. No fiddling required of me.

Docker could do a lot better job in the packaging of their software. Even major updates require manual uninstalling and reinstalling it... Podman just works.

Re: What has Docker become?

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

It's not the 90s anymore.

It that comment says is “I don’t know what docker solves”

Re: What has Docker become?

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's better about it?

The host actually gets RAM back after bursty workloads in the container thanks to memory ballooning. Containers also start up to 5x faster and `npm install` is also much faster because OrbStack uses macOS-specific APIs as much as possible.

The Orbstack dashboard is also something you'll actually enjoy using. It's a native Swift app that launches instantly, not Electron. You get resolvable hostnames for all your containers (though I use traefik instead). Opening a container's filesystem in Finder is another nice trick, I use that one now and then.
Post reply on HN