Why Docker Is Not Yet Succeeding Widely in Production
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Re: Why Docker Is Not Yet Succeeding Widely in Production
#2While the article goes into the more technical reasons for not using Docker in production, the practical reason "Why Docker Is Not Yet Succeeding Widely in Production" is that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The advantages of Docker do not necessarily outweigh the opportunity cost of rewriting the startup's entire infrastructure.
Docker will likely be more prevalent in a few years with startups who have built their infrastructure form the ground up.
Re: Why Docker Is Not Yet Succeeding Widely in Production
#3Some of the points mentioned in the article are in my top hitlist (for decidedly smaller production infrastructure than Shopify): Image building, Logging, Secrets, and Filesystems.
But really, the most painful aspect of using Docker in production, at least in environments where you need multiple physical servers (or VMs) is overall orchestration of the containers, and networking between them.
Things are much better today than they were a year (or 6 months!) ago... but these are two parts of Docker configuration that take the longest to get right.
For orchestration: there are currently at least a dozen different ways to manage containers on multiple servers, and a few seem to be gaining more steam, but it feels much like the JS frameworks era, where there's a new orchestration tool every week: flynn, deis, coreos, mesos, serf, fleet, kubernetes, atomic, machine/swarm/compose, openstack, etc. How does one keep up with all these? Not to mention all the other tooling in software like Ansible, Chef, etc.
For networking: if you're running all your containers on one VM (as most developers do), it's not a big deal. But if you need containers on multiple servers, you not only have to deal with the servers' configuration, provisioning, and networking, but also the containers inside, and getting them to play nicely through the servers' networks. It's akin to running multiple VMs on one physical machine, but without using tools like VMWare or VirtualBox to manage the networking aspects.
Networking is challenging, but at least we have a lot of experience with VMs, which are conceptually similar. Orchestration may take more time to nail down and standardize.
Re: Why Docker Is Not Yet Succeeding Widely in Production
#4I think Simon nailed it with the points under this heading
"Reliance on edgy kernel features"
Officially Docker is only supported on RHEL 7 and up, and most systems I've seen are still on RHEL6.
I think its just a matter of time before Docker goes into Production, where I'm working we're seriously looking at "Dockerizing" lots of things, but OS support keeps popping up.
Re: Why Docker Is Not Yet Succeeding Widely in Production
#5I think the reason is because the tooling and the companies (CoreOS, Joyent, Weave, etc.) building all of the tools, are only focusing on grabbing Fortune 500 customers. Nobody is building Docker tools for the "Blue Collar Apps" of the world. And those companies might be completely justified because the benefits of Docker versus Amazon AMIs/RPMs/DEBs/etc. aren't that big enough to make us go crazy for Docker and switch everything over and fork over cash to these companies.
If I have less than 50 (maybe even 100) EC2 instances for my applications there is no way in hell I am going to run 3 service discovery instances, a few container scheduler instances and so on and so forth.
Re: Why Docker Is Not Yet Succeeding Widely in Production
#6I still haven't been sold on Docker. Why would an otherwise competent company that runs things just fine, ditch it all and adopt Docker? Just because it's the shiny new thing? What do we actually gain here in production?
Re: Why Docker Is Not Yet Succeeding Widely in Production
#7The security question (it's possible to break out of containers) isn't solved, and the workaround (use VMs) eliminates many of the advantages of containers and adds a massive burden.
Re: Why Docker Is Not Yet Succeeding Widely in Production
#8The security question (it's possible to break out of contains) isn't solved, and the workaround (use VMs) eliminates many of the advantages of containers and adds a massive burden.
Re: Why Docker Is Not Yet Succeeding Widely in Production
#9I think Simon nailed it with the points under this heading "Reliance on edgy kernel features" Officially Docker is only supported on RHEL 7 and up, and most systems I've seen are still on RHEL6. I think its just a matter of time before Docker goes into Production, where I'm working we're seriously looking at "Dockerizing" lots of things, but OS support keeps popping up.
This, a thousand times. I'm on CentOS 6 and have switched to docker for some services that don't easily run on that OS. However, I found out the hard way that docker isn't supported on CentOS 6, by having some crashes when building containers (due to bugs in devicemapper). Painful.
I really wish RH had found the time to fix RHEL 6 and support docker.
RHEL 7/CentOS 7 is a big step for many. RHEL 6 isn't even near EOL and many people (including myself) wanted to get more mileage out of CentOS 6.
Re: Why Docker Is Not Yet Succeeding Widely in Production
#10Some of the points mentioned in the article are in my top hitlist (for decidedly smaller production infrastructure than Shopify): Image building, Logging, Secrets, and Filesystems. But really, the most painful aspect of using Docker in production, at least in environments where you need multiple physical servers (or VMs) is overall orchestration of the containers, and networking between them. Things are much better t…
On these points, what are you comparing Docker to? Using bridged networking, you have pretty much the exact same situation with Docker as without. And just because you're running processes with Docker doesn't mean you have to keep up with dozens of tools for automatic clustering and whatnot. If you want to just start your processes manually, or with Ansible or Makefiles or whatever, you can do that.