Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?
131–140 of 248 posts
Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> as a small developer Do you need kubernetes? I know the hype cycle is mad for copying big tech, but if stackoverflow can operate on a couple of IIS instances I’d argue that you almost never need kubernetes.
For me containerization was always about deterministic environments and ease of deployment instead of performance and clustering. But even with these advantages I am currently not using any solution for that. For cloud services this is probably a good idea, even for users to a degree if the provider doesn't already give you a fitting box. But otherwise it is not a must have in my opinion. Maybe that is a mistake and…
I'm currently using k8s in a staging/uat environment (running on a tiny 2 node cluster). So far, I've found it to be super useful in CI, as you can use container orchestration to emulate the larger production IaaS stack with much lower cost and time overhead than, say, a real terraform deployment. And if your team is already drinking the "cloud-native" kool-aid and wanting to use AWS lambda or a similar service, I'd argue it would be a much better investment to deploy those types of workloads as kubernetes jobs or with a framework like OpenFaaS[1] on kubernetes, giving the team much greater flexibility and avoiding vendor lock in.
Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?
#133The problem i have with cubernetes is the following: I as a small developer and small server owner don't have the ressources to even get started. The first thing i see at cubernetes is a cluster. Why a cluster. Do i need to cluster my Raspberry pi's to get something out of it? Do i need to buy 3 servers just to run 5 containers? In docker its easy. Download Docker. Start container. Install container manager like plat…
Dabble with LXC on Linux
Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. None of the things you mentioned are DevOps. DevOps is two things: 1. Applying the methods of modern software development (version control, automation, DSLs...) to operations (provisioning, config, deployment, monitoring, backups...). 2. Reducing silo barriers between devs and ops groups so that everyone is working together as a team, rather than blaming each other for poor communication and the resulting messe…
At last, someone who gets it. Absolutely nailed it. Great answer. I never log into my HN account anymore, but for this response I just had to say: yes. Well said. When you boil the Cloud, DevOps, CloudOps, SecOps, *Ops, CI, CD, Containers, VMs, and all the other technologies we've devised over the past ten years, you always end up at the basic building blocks. You eventually come to the conclusion that all we're real…
Curious about where you see ansible fit in while using Terraform, could you expand on that? Everywhere I have thought I would need ansible to scratch an itch it has turned out that terraform has that functionality in some way (through null_resource, runners).
Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me containerization was always about deterministic environments and ease of deployment instead of performance and clustering. But even with these advantages I am currently not using any solution for that. For cloud services this is probably a good idea, even for users to a degree if the provider doesn't already give you a fitting box. But otherwise it is not a must have in my opinion. Maybe that is a mistake and…
> For me containerization was always about deterministic environments and ease of deployment instead of performance and clustering. But even with these advantages I am currently not using any solution for that. You can get 99% of the way using a stable distribution and a configuration management system (ansible, chef and the like). It's much much simpler than running an orchestration service. I feel most people don't…
So, speaking as a dev, I feel like Docker's killer app is that it makes the config management a lot easier.
Dockerfiles give you a fairly easy and consistent way to express, "The runtime environment needs to have Python 3.5 and these packages," in a format that doesn't introduce too many concepts over and above the basic command line junk you'd use to manage your environment without Docker. If your stack requires multiple services, docker-compose gives you another fairly easy way to describe what all goes into that. And then it gives you a _super_ easy interface for starting and stopping all those services, keeping track of what you have running, all of that.
(And it's all fairly disposable, which is nice, since, as devs, we tend to break things. TBH, if Docker has done nothing else for me, it's that it's turned nuking PostgreSQL to get back to a clean install a 10 second process instead of a 30 minute one.)
It's not really that simple, and I've spent my fair share of time screaming at Docker for being flaky and having confusing under-documented configuration. (And I don't think I'd use it at all if I were working on a platform that weren't so annoyingly susceptible to systemic dependency hell. But worse is better, so the unix philosophy won, so here we are.) But eventually you get over that hump, and it starts feeling fairly easy to understand.
I don't know Chef, but I've seen Ansible used in production, and it just doesn't seem nearly so attractive. It could just be how it's being used, but it felt like there was this infinite regress of complexity where everything was tied to something else and you have to have been the person who built it to understand it, kind of like the bad old days when people were trying to put too much smarts into the database itself so they'd just become this rat's nest of triggers and whatnot. I'm sure it's not that bad. . . but my initial impression was that Docker is great for scratching a developer's itches, but slightly sucks for ops, but maybe is still worthwhile there if you're dealing with microservices or elastic scaling or something like that and you can use Kubernetes to smooth over some of the flakier bits. Ansible is much more for ops, and does a great job there, but I don't see it scratching many dev itches at all.
Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> as a small developer Do you need kubernetes? I know the hype cycle is mad for copying big tech, but if stackoverflow can operate on a couple of IIS instances I’d argue that you almost never need kubernetes.
People jump on bandwagons. Ten years ago you started with PHP + memcache + MySQL running on just a physical box running linux. No Docker or Kubernetes. No virtual machine for what it is worth. Then you split it in multiple PHP frontends with a load balancer or MySQL master and slaves as the traffic demanded it. I think a lot of systems these days are over-engineered and over-paid from day one. It may cost you 10-20 t…
Disclaimer : I get paid to setup k8s clusters for the bandwagon folks
From my perspective k8s is really good for a company who has a team of experienced SRE who can manage k8s well and the company has a marketing team driving new development that needs to get to market fast
It is not cheaper than simple autoscale groups, it is not easier than rebuilding packages with jenkins ( rpm spec files or debian src rebuilds )
It is however the current popular framework so if you want to ride the wave learn it. Also learn how to migrate away from it as that will be a future role as several early adopters are pulling back out of it.
The larger issue is the simple fact automating cloud infrastructure is not trivial so abstract layers lets more people implement things without understanding the lower levels giving folks the appearance of having a complete framework.
It works great until it doesn't. Then it is interesting watching people try to figure out how to fix it.
Learn the lower levels of Linux and k8s will come to you organically
Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?
#137The problem i have with cubernetes is the following: I as a small developer and small server owner don't have the ressources to even get started. The first thing i see at cubernetes is a cluster. Why a cluster. Do i need to cluster my Raspberry pi's to get something out of it? Do i need to buy 3 servers just to run 5 containers? In docker its easy. Download Docker. Start container. Install container manager like plat…
I was looking at https://k3s.io/ as a better configuration management solution than just pure-docker. Because I like kubernetes, I used it, I know it.
Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?
#138Docker sold its soul for money at the cost of its core product. The second you take as much money as they did so you can have your luxury box at AT&T or whatever else I’m going to find it increasingly hard to sympathize with your future mistakes.
Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?
#139My experience agrees with this. I'm a huge fan of Docker, I've actively taken part since the early days, attending meetups and using it actively day to day. Unfortunately, when I brought several issues to GitHub, or +1'd other people's issues that were affecting the usability within our company, the attitude was very much "f* you and your problems" because Docker want things to be one way and that's how it'll be. The…
> ..., I no longer go to Docker to solve problems that could be solved in Docker (secrets anyone? without the "hacks"), and just look towards the other tools solving the problems.
Are you talking about k8s or do you mean something like bitnamis sealed secrets?
Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?
#140The problem i have with cubernetes is the following: I as a small developer and small server owner don't have the ressources to even get started. The first thing i see at cubernetes is a cluster. Why a cluster. Do i need to cluster my Raspberry pi's to get something out of it? Do i need to buy 3 servers just to run 5 containers? In docker its easy. Download Docker. Start container. Install container manager like plat…
>> I as a small developer and small server owner... You'll never ever need either Docker or Kubernetes or even the latest and greatest javascript frameworks. I started running a server before I knew anything and that server is still purring along happily. But if you're ever targeting an enterprise, either as a freelancer or as an employee, those words are invaluable in your resume. It of course helps if you actually…
The point is to deploy immutable images that were clean rebuilt from scratch and tested prior to deployment, rather than upgrading an environment which becomes risky after some time.
Another added value is automatic actions based on container watchers, traefik for example will self-configure on the fly when you just spawn a container with the hostname in a label.
If deployment becomes that easy then why not leverage gitlab dynamic environment feature and deploy on $branchname.ci.example.com so that you can have say a product owner to review the development prior to merging to master (which would deploy to staging if you have an aggressive CD strategy - which I do)