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Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

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Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

#231
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

How often are you spinning up new servers? In one to two hours, I can configure a production ready Debian server from base install with firewall rules, correct network interfaces, cron jobs, all dependencies and tooling, monitoring, Postgres, and my application server (either C epoll passed or Spring Boot) sitting behind an nginx proxy. I would consider myself neither a Sysadmin nor particularly fast at configuring L…

I actually run all my docker services on one 16-core server.

Great thing about Docker is a commit is all that's needed to reproduce everything since I also use terraform to deploy the infrastructure.

Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

#232
post #153

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,…

> someone else does it, maybe better, open sources it, community forms around it, you're toast

Oracle is very much okay still with superior technology, despite open source, and community, if we are talking about PostgreSQL.

Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

#233
post #204
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:) 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 confl…

All my mentions of issues or friction in my previous comment was about pre-k8s team's experiences... I try and clarify a few key cases in the following: > Successful utilization of k8s, interesting metric, what is your criteria ? Sorry, what pain motivated using k8s, and using k8s relieved that pain. > I have seen properly staffed startups (in silicon valley) What is 'proper' for staffing? >> Are your SRE shipping th…

What I've learned from the comments above is k8s consulting business is the best thing since OOP. Just tell the marketing team you have a magic button that being installed will give them ability to change the course of business every 5 minutes by handwaving and a PowerPoint slide.

Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

#234
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They haven't. As an example of where this lack of efficiency comes from, recently I've fixed an issue during which I've discovered that the Etcd component of k8s uses periodic (10 sec) liveness checking, where for every check (launching of the etcdctl client), the `runc` binary (from container.d) is executed 3 (three) times. You can imagine this probably just scratches the surface.

Ugh! Was the fix committed upstream?

Yes, this one was a systemd detection in runc, which was causing big log flooding and runtime overhead due to runc being executed so frequently. I initially cached the checks, but later the devs removed them altogether. Still, this is not solving the inefficiencies in k8s. https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/76531

Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

#235
post #153

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,…

Parenthetically, Linux being an open source reincarnation of Solaris seems also an example, no?

Solaris is more an example of Oracle's shittiness, it was doing fine with Sun, plenty of places that still relied on it being a commercially supported unix, even when it was open sourced.

Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

#236

Earlier 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. 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 mul…

> So, speaking as a dev, I feel like Docker's killer app is that it makes the config management a lot easier.

It starts with a Dockerfile, which is a limited shell script, and it does not get any better beyond that. Shell scripts are simple, I'll give you that, but please don't sell them as some magic bullet. Dockerfiles are no configuration management system.

I've seen my fair share of hairy chef, puppet and ansible in the wild. Don't read into config management from those. I've also seen beautiful ansible installs, which deploy from dev setups all the way up to full infrastructure setup and deployment with blue-green deployment.

Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

#237
post #204
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:) 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 confl…

All my mentions of issues or friction in my previous comment was about pre-k8s team's experiences... I try and clarify a few key cases in the following: > Successful utilization of k8s, interesting metric, what is your criteria ? Sorry, what pain motivated using k8s, and using k8s relieved that pain. > I have seen properly staffed startups (in silicon valley) What is 'proper' for staffing? >> Are your SRE shipping th…

>Sorry, what pain motivated using k8s, and using k8s relieved that pain.

CTO / CIO / $SOME_C reads a blog and decides they want k8s is how it usually is introduced

> What is 'proper' for staffing?

Experienced C Developers who can do operations ( like google level SRE )

Summary of k8s : if you use the proper methodology to implement k8s and you are in a cloud framework you likely dont need k8s :)

What shines about k8s is it leverages the current container fad to ship code faster because devs like it. The current container fad pushes the burden of supporting buggy code to operations teams. IF the operations teams have issues they had better be highly skilled to figure them out

I have yet to see a company let requirements drive the choice to use k8s.

Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mul…

> So, speaking as a dev, I feel like Docker's killer app is that it makes the config management a lot easier. It starts with a Dockerfile, which is a limited shell script, and it does not get any better beyond that. Shell scripts are simple, I'll give you that, but please don't sell them as some magic bullet. Dockerfiles are no configuration management system. I've seen my fair share of hairy chef, puppet and ansible…

> Dockerfiles are no configuration management system.

Y'know, we might violently agree. That is a much more concise statement than my rambling attempt to explain why I think Docker is so much more palatable for development workflows.

You're right, it is no magic bullet. And I misspoke when I said "configuration management"; I forgot that that's a term of art in operations. By "management" I really just meant "stick it all in one or two files so I can get my checklist down to one step, and manage shared packages in a way that's at least a little bit less kludgey than simply abusing environment variables." So I find that it save some yak shaving, and for that I can deal with it under certain circumstances.

I actually hate using it for deployment or production config management, because IMO it seems to do a crap job at it. And it does a crap job at it precisely because of the features (or lack of features) that make it convenient for development. Even using it to manage our integration tests' runtime dependencies is kind of a hot mess. But I'm willing to concede that, together with Kubernetes, it might be nice for cloud-native elastic scaling microservice-y stuff, insofar as it seems to be popular for that. I don't actually know firsthand; I'm allergic to complexity, so try to avoid building things that way.

Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

#239
post #112

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…

I don’t think kubernetes is nice because I’ve seen more than one small team throw a lot of resources at it and fail. I’m not attacking docker, however, I can see why you would want containers. We still haven’t found an efficient usage for them at my place, but we never need to spin up more than one instance of our software. I think docker can sometimes be a way to cheat unsafe software around operations, but that’s m…

could you elaborate more about failure of kubernetes? I'm considering using docker/kubernetes in our production so to hear warning stories would be extremely helpful.

Re: Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

#240
post #86
post #46

Earlier 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.

Yeah, for my side projects I just use gitlab CI + docker compose. Builds use the dind images on gitlab's runners to build an image and push to their container registry. For deployments I have a host with a personal CI runner instance on Linode's smallest instance type which can access a user on the "production" host when SSHing over a private network, and has the docker-compose command allowed in the sudoers file. Th…

I've used Docker Compose and Swarm for small-scale stuff too - it's really easy to work with, doesn't use much CPU for management (something k8s os/was notorious for - not sute if that's still valid?), the docs are pretty good, and there are a gazillion YAML templates on GitHub to use as a reference.

Compose and Swarm can take you pretty far, but TBH, it felt like Docker gave up on them years ago, even before k8s "won" the container orchestration war. A real shame :(

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