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Goodbye Docker on CentOS, Hello Ubuntu

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Re: Goodbye Docker on CentOS, Hello Ubuntu

#21

Post by Jedd »

ricardobeat wrote: post #17
Jedd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this surprised me too, given the stated interest in a light-weight, server (no GUI) platform. But we see this a lot - people jump onto Ubuntu despite not having an interest in running Unity, Mir, upstart, etc, or having a slightly fancier installer, or different schedule on release of stable / long term support versions. I suspect it's simply that for many people unfamiliar with the various GNU/Linux distros, U…

He installed Ubuntu Server, which does not have a graphical interface. Being "heard of more often" translates into the most up-to-date package manager, a well-known and long-term supported system, and wider software compatibility than any other distro, all great qualities for a server.

Yes, you're right wrt the GUI. I'd kind of tangentially gone off about the 'I need a better GNU/Linux distro - I'll use a derivative of Debian' angle. I had a look for a package list for current Ubuntu Server LTS (now 20 months old) but couldn't find one. I expect it includes upstart, given the vintage. Nonetheless.

Could you please explain this reasoning:

  > Being "heard of more often" translates into the most up-to-date package manager
I think you're agreeing with me when I say Ubuntu is heard of more often, and you say it's well-known.

Support -- have you compared the length of support for Debian stable and Ubuntu LTS releases? Did you conclude that Ubuntu has long-term support and Debian does not?

Can you also explain what you mean by:

  > [Ubuntu has] wider software compatibility than any other distro
I'd be curious what software runs on Ubuntu that doesn't run on, Debian, CentOS/RHEL, etc.

Re: Goodbye Docker on CentOS, Hello Ubuntu

#22

Post by akeck »

I've had different trouble with Docker on CentOS 7. Last November, I created a POC Kubernetes cluster on top of the shipping CentOS 7 Docker infrastructure (1.8 at the time), and then beat the hell out of it. After a week or so, I lost a node to XFS file system corruption in the Docker image tree. The only solution I could find that worked was uninstalling Docker, wiping the Docker image tree in /var, and then reinstalling Docker. Kubernetes would then resume distributing containers to the node. Every node died in this manner at least once during the POC. With Kubernetes managing the containers, it wasn't a disaster - just really annoying.

Re: Goodbye Docker on CentOS, Hello Ubuntu

#23

Post by codinghorror »

I strongly DO NOT recommend using devicemapper as storage in Docker. Every time we have tried, and every customer who has tried, has failed medium to long term, in bad ways. It became so painful that we literally blacklist devicemapper as a supported filesystem in the Discourse installer.

We waited a year for this to "stabilize" but it never did.

Re: Goodbye Docker on CentOS, Hello Ubuntu

#24

Post by rodgerd »

Patrick_Devine wrote: post #7

You can find some notes on tuning devicemapper here: https://jpetazzo.github.io/assets/2015-03-03-not-so-deep-div... If you've got a new enough kernel though (i.e. 3.18+), you're best off using Overlay for your storage driver. It's fast and doesn't require a lot of tuning.

> you're best off using Overlay for your storage driver.

As long as you don't mind gifting root to your container tenants.

Re: Goodbye Docker on CentOS, Hello Ubuntu

#25

Post by hhw »

mbreese wrote: post #13
hhw wrote: post #9

From the op: "I enjoyed its minimal install to create a light environment, intuitive installation process, and it’s package manager." CentOS is neither minimal nor light. Ubuntu also isn't either of these things. Both of these distributions are more targeted towards convenience and ease of use, which means a lot of features/services that are generally unnecessary are enabled by default. The main reasons to use CentOS…

The minimal CentOS install is pretty lightweight. It's not a tiny distro by any means, but for keeping w/in the RHEL/CentOS realm, it's really pretty good. It's the only version that I install on servers, just to keep the excess cruft out (no X, no Gnome, no extra services, etc...).

There's still a whack of services that should be disabled on a server like rpc/nfs, bluetooth, avahi, etc (depending on 5.x/6.x/7.x) even if you go with a minimal install. Bloat aside, they can be security risks.

Re: Goodbye Docker on CentOS, Hello Ubuntu

#26

Post by hhw »

ricardobeat wrote: post #17
Jedd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this surprised me too, given the stated interest in a light-weight, server (no GUI) platform. But we see this a lot - people jump onto Ubuntu despite not having an interest in running Unity, Mir, upstart, etc, or having a slightly fancier installer, or different schedule on release of stable / long term support versions. I suspect it's simply that for many people unfamiliar with the various GNU/Linux distros, U…

He installed Ubuntu Server, which does not have a graphical interface. Being "heard of more often" translates into the most up-to-date package manager, a well-known and long-term supported system, and wider software compatibility than any other distro, all great qualities for a server.

The real package manager itself comes upstream from Debian; Ubuntu just normally puts fragile GUIs around it. Most of the positives for Ubuntu come from Debian. The Ubuntu specific stuff on the other hand sometimes breaks core functionality like booting off software RAID being broken in 12.x, which has worked fine in Debian for at least a decade.

Generally speaking, a server environment is not the right place to run bleeding edge software. Debian's conservatism is quite sensible when it comes to production server environments, and traditionally (before the whole systemd debacle) they were pretty good at prioritizing stability over the feature of the week demanded by more desktop-centric folks. There's Ubuntu and other derivatives that can cater to their specific needs without compromising the integrity of the distribution in general. And if you have a specific application that requires a more recent version, you can always make use of a 3rd party repository (that you'd of course have carefully vetted first), a binary package, or just rolling your own from source. It makes much more sense to take those extra steps for specific applications than take a blanket approach to rolling out new code all over your production environment.

Re: Goodbye Docker on CentOS, Hello Ubuntu

#27

Post by cmurf »

rusher81572 wrote: post #5
cmurf wrote: post #4

I haven't used AUFS or overlay(fs), only devicemapper (thin provisioning) and Btrfs. Btrfs is faster than devicemapper, but even creating and removing containers seems slower than it ought to be considering how little delta there is. The create/remove time with 'btrfs sub crea/del' is much faster than docker create or remove (container), so I'm not really sure where the delays are.

Good comment. Did you try on CentOS or Ubuntu?

Fedora Cloud Atomic 23 on an Intel NUC.

Re: Goodbye Docker on CentOS, Hello Ubuntu

#28

Post by xellisx »

mbreese wrote: post #13
hhw wrote: post #9

From the op: "I enjoyed its minimal install to create a light environment, intuitive installation process, and it’s package manager." CentOS is neither minimal nor light. Ubuntu also isn't either of these things. Both of these distributions are more targeted towards convenience and ease of use, which means a lot of features/services that are generally unnecessary are enabled by default. The main reasons to use CentOS…

The minimal CentOS install is pretty lightweight. It's not a tiny distro by any means, but for keeping w/in the RHEL/CentOS realm, it's really pretty good. It's the only version that I install on servers, just to keep the excess cruft out (no X, no Gnome, no extra services, etc...).

I just did an install of CentOS with the minimal setting, and I am amazed by the crap that is loaded up vs not loaded. Don't need sound, don't need IPv6, don't need wireless. The base install is missing stuff like nano, wget, network related tools like traceroute, and several other packages. Thankfully, bluetooth or CUPs wasn't in the list this time.

Re: Goodbye Docker on CentOS, Hello Ubuntu

#29

Post by stefanha »

Never had performance issues with the Docker device-mapper graph driver on Fedora 23. No tweaking was necessary. I imagine CentOS is similar although it may not use the latest and greatest features.

There is not enough information in this blog post to say exactly what the problem is, but switching distros may be overkill here.

Re: Goodbye Docker on CentOS, Hello Ubuntu

#30

Post by elricL »

Patrick_Devine wrote: post #7

You can find some notes on tuning devicemapper here: https://jpetazzo.github.io/assets/2015-03-03-not-so-deep-div... If you've got a new enough kernel though (i.e. 3.18+), you're best off using Overlay for your storage driver. It's fast and doesn't require a lot of tuning.

Last I checked, OverlayFS did not play well with tools like Yum/Pip. Has this been fixed?
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