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Containers Don't Solve Everything

blog.deref.io

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Re: Containers Don't Solve Everything

#31

Post by bob1029 »

superkuh wrote: post #3

It depends on the context, I don't know about corporate persons with profit incentives but if we're talking human persons then containers don't solve anything. They're just the symptom of the disease that is future shock. The underlying libraries we depend on just change too fast now and no devs care about forwards compatibility so we end up with all OS/Distros having libs that stop working in about a year (or more l…

> getting devs to actually care if their software runs on platforms more than a year old.

This is why we don't play games with siloing responsibilities on the tech stack. Every single developer on the team is responsible for making the entire product work on whatever machine it is intended to work on. No one gets to play "not my job", so they are encouraged to select robust solutions lest they be paged to resolve their own mess in the future.

Maybe those solutions are containers in some cases, but not for our shop right now. Our product ships as a single .NET binary that can run on any x86 machine supported by the runtime.

Re: Containers Don't Solve Everything

#32

Post by asim »

I spent 6+ years fighting this exact battle. It's hard. It's resource intensive. And timing is everything. It requires either one company to front all the development cost and bring it to the world after validating it or it needs an ecosystem to emerge through a shared pain and understanding. We're not there yet.

My efforts => https://micro.mu

Oh and prior efforts https://github.com/asim/go-micro

Re: Containers Don't Solve Everything

#33

Post by tyingq »

superkuh wrote: post #3

It depends on the context, I don't know about corporate persons with profit incentives but if we're talking human persons then containers don't solve anything. They're just the symptom of the disease that is future shock. The underlying libraries we depend on just change too fast now and no devs care about forwards compatibility so we end up with all OS/Distros having libs that stop working in about a year (or more l…

Java running in a container is somewhat amusing because of this. So you have a several solutions to the problem of agnostic packaging (java/jar/ear/war/etc) running inside another whole solution for agnostic packaging.

Re: Containers Don't Solve Everything

#34

Post by ozim »

the-dude wrote: post #7
OfflineSergio wrote: post #4

What solves everything?

Silver bullets

Well you are onto something.

Even if it is a joke, people want to have silver bullets. Those are killing the hairy problems which can be named werewolves.

Downside is hairy problems just like werewolves come from people. So it in the end it is people problems not some container tech or other stack problem. There are no werewolves without people :)

Re: Containers Don't Solve Everything

#35

Post by jzoch »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #23
MaxGabriel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a lot of stuff that Nix solves, the multiple versions of libraries coexisting part at least

Nix strikes me as the Linux community looking at an overly complicated problem of their own making and deciding that the solution is to add even more complexity. Don't get me wrong, from what I hear Nix actually does deliver on the promise for the most part, it's just that you have to learn a new language to use it effectively and of course it has its own quirks.

What solution wouldn't require its own specification + quirks? Whether its a Dockerfile or nix package I don't see the difference besides people tend to be familiar with only 1 of the many options.

Im not comparing whether Dockerfiles or buildpacks or nix packages are more ergonomic than one another but i do think your comment is...misguided. From what I have heard Nix is pretty wonderful to use and simplifies the problem - it just requires you learn about Nix a bit which i think is a fair trade-off for the benefits it supposedly provides

Re: Containers Don't Solve Everything

#36

Post by 5e92cb50239222b »

tyingq wrote: post #33
superkuh wrote: post #3

It depends on the context, I don't know about corporate persons with profit incentives but if we're talking human persons then containers don't solve anything. They're just the symptom of the disease that is future shock. The underlying libraries we depend on just change too fast now and no devs care about forwards compatibility so we end up with all OS/Distros having libs that stop working in about a year (or more l…

Java running in a container is somewhat amusing because of this. So you have a several solutions to the problem of agnostic packaging (java/jar/ear/war/etc) running inside another whole solution for agnostic packaging.

I don't think there's another way to ship custom certificate authorities without using containers? It's something you absolutely have to do around here if you want to interact with government APIs of any kind.

I relatively rarely work with Java and am probably mistaken.

Re: Containers Don't Solve Everything

#37

Post by raesene9 »

johnchristopher wrote: post #26
kendru wrote: post #2

Author here. I have been developing Docker applications for years now, and while the experience is better than it used to be, it's still not great. I work for Deref, which is working on developer tooling that is more amenable to modern development workflows. We'd love to hear what pains you have with the current state of development environments.

I am not a 10x engineer or a linux wizard. I wish someone would rewrite docker-compose in a single go or rust binary so that I don't have to deal with the python3 crypto package being out of date or something when simply configuring docker/docker-compose for another user (usually me on a different machine or new account).

https://docs.docker.com/compose/cli-command/

^ There's an rc of a compose command built into the standard docker CLI.

Re: Containers Don't Solve Everything

#38

Post by raesene9 »

superkuh wrote: post #3

It depends on the context, I don't know about corporate persons with profit incentives but if we're talking human persons then containers don't solve anything. They're just the symptom of the disease that is future shock. The underlying libraries we depend on just change too fast now and no devs care about forwards compatibility so we end up with all OS/Distros having libs that stop working in about a year (or more l…

Containers solve the problem of clashing library versions needed by different applications running on a single host (and I know there are other ways to solve this).

This is really not a new problem :) I remeber dealing with shared libary versioning issues from no long after I started in IT in the 90's and it's been a problem since.

Solving that problem seems like a win to me.

Re: Containers Don't Solve Everything

#39

Post by ryanmarsh »

kendru wrote: post #13
ryanmarsh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do "modern development workflows" differ?

When I started in software development, I was mostly working on monoliths. All dependencies were vendored or were expected to be dynamically linked on the system where they were deployed. Next, I started working with Docker and languages with better package management. Dependencies were fetched in CI and were either statically linked or packaged in a container with the application I was working on. Still, these were…

Thank you. That’s a worthwhile distinction to make. I often hear the word “modern” bandied about by developers trying to advocate for something novel. If you haven’t already it might be rewarding to fully articulate this in long form, including the consequences and implications. I wish I was a better writer or I’d write this myself.

Re: Containers Don't Solve Everything

#40

Post by superkuh »

rualca wrote: post #21
encryptluks2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think dependencies is the only benefit of containers. I personally like the isolation they provide and generally prefer running services in containers, even if they are using the same dependencies as my OS. I run Linux too, so I don't have to worry about any virtualization framework overhead.

> I personally like the isolation they provide and generally prefer running services in containers, even if they are using the same dependencies as my OS. I would also not downplay the importance of Docker's support for software-defined networks and it's ability to arbitrarily configure networking at the container level. I firmly believe that networking doesn't pop up so often while discussing Docker because Docker s…

Have they fixed ipv6 support yet?
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