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I ditched Docker for Podman

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Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#231

Post by tecleandor »

nickjj wrote: post #46
t43562 wrote: post #21

To provide 1 contrary opinion to all the others saying they have a problem: Podman rocks for me! I find docker hard to use and full of pitfalls and podman isn't any worse. On the plus side, any company I work for doesn't have to worry about licences. Win win!

> On the plus side, any company I work for doesn't have to worry about licences. Win win! Was this a deal breaker for any company? I ask because the Docker Desktop paid license requirement is quite reasonable. If you have less than 250 employees and make less than $10 million in annual revenue it's free. If you have a dev team of 10 people and are extremely profitable to where you need licenses you'd end up paying $9…

I've seen a weird thing on their service agreement:

Use Restrictions. Customer and its Users may not and may not allow any third party to: [...] 10. Access the Service for the purpose of developing or operating products or services intended to be offered to third parties in competition with the Services[...]

Emphasis mine on 'operating'.

So I cannot use Docker Desktop to operate, for example: ECR, GCR or Harbor?

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#232

Post by condenser »

I'm interested in using podman for my homeserver because of the deamonless and rootlessnes nature, but I haven't found a convenient replacement for docker compose.

On my dev machine I do `docker compose up -d --build` in the directory of the Dockerfile, and it builds, uploads, and restarts the service on the server. In the podman world you're supposed to use Quadlets, which can be rsynced to the server, but I haven't found something simple for the build-step that doesn't involve an external registry or manually transferring the image.

What's the end-to-end solution for this?

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#233

Post by Aurornis »

nickjj wrote: post #67
akerl_ wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn’t generally the cost, it’s the complexity. You end up having to track who has it installed. Hired 5 more people this week? How many of them will want docker desktop? Oh, we’ve maxed the licenses we bought? Time to re-open the procurement process and amend the purchase order.

A large company who is buying licenses for tools has to deal with this for many different things. Docker is not unique here. An IT department for a company of that size should have ironed out workflows and automated ways to keep tabs on who has what and who needs what. They may also be under various compliance requirements that expect due diligence to happen every quarter to make sure everything is legit from a licen…

> An IT department for a company of that size should have ironed out workflows and automated ways to keep tabs on who has what and who needs what. They may also be under various compliance requirements that expect due diligence to happen every quarter to make sure everything is legit from a licensing perspective.

Correct, but every additional software package and each additional license adds more to track.

Every new software license requires legal to review it.

These centralized departments add up all of the license and SaaS costs and it shows up as one big number, which executives start pushing to decrease. When you let everyone get a license for everything they might need, it gets out of control quickly (many startups relearn this lesson in their growth phase)

Then they start investigating how often people use software packages and realize most people aren't actually using most software they have seats for. This happens because when software feels 'free' people request it for one-time use for a thing or to try it out and then forget about it, so you have low utilization across the board.

So they start making it harder to add new software. They start auditing usage. They may want reports on why software is still needed and who uses it.

It all adds up. I understand you don't think it should be this way, but it is at big companies. You're right that that the $24/user per month isn't much, but it's one of dozens of fees that get added, multiplied by every employee in the company, and now they need someone to maintain licenses, get them reviewed, interact with the rep every year, do the negotiation battles, and so on. It adds up fast.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#234

Post by r_lee »

vbezhenar wrote: post #70

I did numerous attempts to switch from docker to podman. Latest one worked, and so far I didn't feel the need to get back to docker. There was only one issue that I had: huge uid didn't work in podman (like 1000000 I think), but I fixed the dockerfile and rest worked fine for me. podman-compose does not work well in my experience, but I don't use it anymore.

have you tried nerdctl? its basically just the containerd cli which is close to k8s and etc. not a for profit thing, just following containerd spec

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#235

Post by mring33621 »

sirmike_ wrote: post #130

ever try to dev with it on a Mac? haha. Nope. No thank you. Not sure if Windows has that issue.

I'm using 'podman' with 'k8s/kind' on my M1 macbook and have had very few issues

Maybe a couple quirks with TCP port access, but a quick convo with gemini helped me

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#236

Post by rsyring »

awoimbee wrote: post #220

The main issue is podman support on Ubuntu. Ubuntu ships outdated podman versions that don't work out of the box. So I use podman v5, GitHub actions uses podman v3, and my coworkers on Ubuntu use docker. So now my script must work with old podman, recent podman and docker

Additionally, there aren't even any trusted repos out there building/publishing a .deb for it. The ones that I could find when I searched last were all outdated or indicated they were not going to keep moving forward.

I could get over this. But, IMO, it lends itself to asking the "why" question. Why wouldn't Podman make installing it easier? And the only thing that makes sense to me is that RedHat doesn't want their dev effort supporting their competitor's products.

That's a perfectly reasonable stance, they owe me nothing. But, it does make me feel that anything not in the RH ecosystem is going to be treated as a second-class citizen. That concerns me more than having to build my own debs.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#237

Post by troyvit »

awoimbee wrote: post #220

The main issue is podman support on Ubuntu. Ubuntu ships outdated podman versions that don't work out of the box. So I use podman v5, GitHub actions uses podman v3, and my coworkers on Ubuntu use docker. So now my script must work with old podman, recent podman and docker

This is my biggest problem too, and it's not just my problem but Podman's problem. Lack of name recognition is big for sure compared to Docker, but to me this version mismatch problem is higher on the list and more sure to keep Podman niche. Distros like Ubuntu always ship with older versions of software, it's sadly up to the maintainer to release newer versions, and Podman just doesn't seem interested in doing that. I don't know if it was their goal but it got me to use some RedHat derivative on my home server just to get a later version.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#238

Post by Aurornis »

devjab wrote: post #107
akerl_ wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn’t generally the cost, it’s the complexity. You end up having to track who has it installed. Hired 5 more people this week? How many of them will want docker desktop? Oh, we’ve maxed the licenses we bought? Time to re-open the procurement process and amend the purchase order.

> You end up having to track who has it installed. Hired 5 more people this week? How many of them will want docker desktop? Oh, we’ve maxed the licenses we bought? Time to re-open the procurement process and amend the purchase order. I don't quite get this argument. How is that different from any piece of software that an employee will want in any sort of enterprise setting? From an IT operations perspective it is t…

You're right that it's no different than other software, but when you reach the point where the average employee has 20-30 different licenses for all the different things they might use, managing it all becomes a job for multiple people.

Costs and management grow in an O(n*m) manner where n is employees and m is numbers of licenses per employee. It seems like nothing when you're small and people only need a couple licenses, but a few years in the aggregate bills are eye-popping and you realize the majority of people don't use most of the licenses they've requested (it really happens).

Contrast this with what it takes for an engineer to use a common, free tool: They can just use it. No approval process. No extra management steps for anyone. Nothing to argue that you need to use it every year at license audit time. Just run with it.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#239

Post by radlad »

k4rli wrote: post #143
nickjj wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the plus side, any company I work for doesn't have to worry about licences. Win win! Was this a deal breaker for any company? I ask because the Docker Desktop paid license requirement is quite reasonable. If you have less than 250 employees and make less than $10 million in annual revenue it's free. If you have a dev team of 10 people and are extremely profitable to where you need licenses you'd end up paying $9…

Docker Desktop is also (imo) useless and helps be ignorant. Most Mac users I see using it struggle to see the difference between "image" and "container". Complete lack of understanding. All the same stuff can easily be done from cli.

I don't believe it's possible to run Docker on macOS without Docker Desktop (at least not without something like lima.) AFAIUI, Docker Desktop contains not just the GUI, but also the hypervisor layer. Is my understanding mistaken?

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#240

Post by rsyring »

condenser wrote: post #232

I'm interested in using podman for my homeserver because of the deamonless and rootlessnes nature, but I haven't found a convenient replacement for docker compose. On my dev machine I do `docker compose up -d --build` in the directory of the Dockerfile, and it builds, uploads, and restarts the service on the server. In the podman world you're supposed to use Quadlets, which can be rsynced to the server, but I haven't…

Might be part of your solution: https://github.com/psviderski/unregistry

> Unregistry is a lightweight container image registry that stores and serves images directly from your Docker daemon's storage. > > The included docker pussh command (extra 's' for SSH) lets you push images straight to remote Docker servers over SSH. It transfers only the missing layers, making it fast and efficient.

But, given that podman rootless doesn't have a daemon like Docker, I think using Podman in a push-to-remote scenario is just going to have more pieces for you to manually manage.

There are PaaS solutions out there, like Dokku, that would give you a better devx but will also bring additional setup and complexity.

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