Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

#151

Post by cpb » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 2:48 PM UTC

geggam wrote: post #136

ChrisCinelli wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 )…

In your experience, what is the strongest point of evidence leading to the successful utilization of k8s?

> the company has a marketing team driving new development that needs to get to market fast

At what point in the growth curve? Are your SRE shipping the new features, or running like a red queen to keep the product developers able to keep shipping?

What development process or cycle has overheated with friction that requires k8s? Where is that friction which k8s relieves?

Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

#152

Post by faitswulff » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 2:52 PM UTC

pacala wrote: post #128

alias_neo wrote: post #114

My 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 wonder how much of that attitude was caused by an overstretched team with no effective scaling mechanism in place. No, "open source" does not automatically mean "scalable team". Part of Kubernetes success is its ability to scale up the community, empowering multiple entities to meaningfully contribute.

Scaling is an issue with any company, but judging by a friend's description of working there, there's almost certainly a large company culture / attitude factor as well.

Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

#153

Post by 013a » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 2:54 PM UTC

There's this prevalent false position that Kubernetes is successful because of Google.

Yeah, Kubernetes initially learned a ton because of Borg and Google's deep investment into containers dating back a very long time. But, arguably, Kubernetes is successful because Google Let It Go. Its a true open source project, with governance by a wide number of industry advocates, underneath the Linux Foundation.

By comparison, Docker is a VC-backed profit-minded startup. Of course it was going to lose this race, for the same reason Windows isn't the dominant OS in the cloud.

Fundamentally: You can't build a hyperscale startup based on a technology. It doesn't appear to work anymore. The best case is the Docker/Kubernetes or Oracle/Postgres/MySQL case: someone else does it, maybe better, open sources it, community forms around it, you're toast. The worst case is the MongoDB/AWS or Elastic/AWS case; a cloud provider copies you, probably does it worse, but its cheaper and more integrated with the cloud, so they still win.

Docker was doomed; they could have been a very nice business, but the issue is taking on huge valuations and capital, scaling like mad, and then finding out you have no ground underneath your feet to support that valuation.

Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

#154

Post by Blackstone4 » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 3:05 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #150

K8s is a “datacenter operating system”, just like VMWare’s own VSphere, or Mesos, Mosix, etc. These solutions also compete for mindshare with mainframe solutions like IBM’s; and with “control planes” like OpenStack, Canonical’s Landscape, or (I think?) Microsoft’s System Center. This space is very, very profitable. None of this applies to Docker itself. Docker is “just” a virtualization technology. Sure, Docker Swarm…

Doesn't K8s typically run on virtual machines? In which case it's K8s + VMs to get to the “datacenter operating system” model?

Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

#155

Post by geggam » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 3:06 PM UTC

cpb wrote: post #151

geggam wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 )…

In your experience, what is the strongest point of evidence leading to the successful utilization of k8s? > the company has a marketing team driving new development that needs to get to market fast At what point in the growth curve? Are your SRE shipping the new features, or running like a red queen to keep the product developers able to keep shipping? What development process or cycle has overheated with friction th…

:)

Successful utilization of k8s, interesting metric, what is your criteria ?

>At what point in the growth curve?

I have seen properly staffed startups (in silicon valley) leverage the platform to pivot direction fast but overall I would say you need a large enterprise to support it. Ironically the large enterprise which could benefit the most wants to lay ITIL on top of k8s, call it agile and the methodologies conflict creating more issues than they had.

> Are your SRE shipping the new features, or running like a red queen to keep the product developers able to keep shipping?

Yes to both

>What development process or cycle has overheated with friction that requires k8s?

Upgrading k8s :)

>Where is that friction which k8s relieves?

What k8s relieves is once you get a pipeline getting product to production fast, the approval process from legacy ITIL groups being the problem ( I have yet to see an enterprise company use k8s properly though I have been to presentations where some claim to have done this )

If someone attempts to use ITIL and k8s you are going to have problems. Training people to NOT do this is the #1 issue in my experience.

Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

#156

Post by eeZah7Ux » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 3:07 PM UTC

goatinaboat wrote: post #21

For a very long time there was a gaping security hole in Docker: anyone who could run a container could mount anything on the underlying host as root. This says to me that Docker (the company) don’t really consider any use cases beyond “fooling around on a personal laptop”. Meanwhile other container projects took seriously from day 1 that they would need to run in production. Docker (the company) certainly helped to…

> Docker (the company) don’t really consider any use cases beyond “fooling around on a personal laptop”

Much worse: Docker was never built with security in mind but the company kept pushing it as production ready.

Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

#157

Post by cheez » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 3:10 PM UTC

thunderbong wrote: post #34

paule89 wrote: post #15

The 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…

When you break fast and move things, Docker is invaluable. I have more than one product and something like Docker makes it tractable for a single person to support.

Still, I run it all on one server using Docker so there is a medium :-)

Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

#158

Post by eeZah7Ux » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 3:10 PM UTC

dagw wrote: post #32

FreeHugs wrote: post #30

Weep? Docker's downfall? What happened? As far as I can tell, everybody and his grandmother is using Docker. Why should we weep about it?

'Everybody' is using docker the software, 'nobody' is using (ie paying) Docker the company. The article makes it clear they're talking about the company.

> 'Everybody' is using docker the software

Not at all - thanks goodness.

Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

#159

Post by Dowwie » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 3:14 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #81

Dowwie wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kubernetes seems to be intended for large, complex environments but yours seems to not meet that category. What have you gained by using it?

(Not OP) I'm running a single node kubernetes cluster because it provides much needed isolation between services as well as, and that's the biggest part, a aingle and simple way to have everything in one place. I can duplicate a service I'm running 1:1 with a new version for testing in 2 minutes, I can tear it down in 2 seconds. I can roll back changes in one command, I can wipe the server and reinstall everything fr…

Sounds too good to be true. What challenges have you faced by using Kubernetes?

Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

#160

Post by dsr_ » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 3:15 PM UTC

peterwwillis wrote: post #147

dsr_ wrote: post #96

Earlier 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…

Just some minor clarifications: - DevOps is a peer with Agile and Lean. Scrum and XP are Agile implementations. Scrum doesn't prescribe ways to code, XP does. - 90% of what people develop or run today should be in containers, and not because containers are great, but because of the DevOps patterns of IaC, immutability, reproducibility, homogeneous environments. Whether you run them on your laptop, a VPC, AWS Fargate,…

Please do me the favor of engaging with what I wrote.