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Tiny Linux distro that runs the entire OS as Docker containers

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Re: Tiny Linux distro that runs the entire OS as Docker containers

#41

Post by cookiecaper »

eikenberry wrote: post #35
cookiecaper wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Here's one example that I've dealt with in the last week. We have a server that receives the logs from our kubernetes cluster via fluentd and parses/transforms them before shipping them out to a hosted log search backend thingy. This host has 5 Docker containers running fluentd receivers. This works OK most of the time, but in some cases, particularly cases when the log volume is high and/or when a bug causes e…

I think you are suffering a bit from the over-engineering of Kubernetes and Docker and throwing the baby out with the bath water. Containers in general are great for simplifying deployment, development and testing. We use docker currently and it works great, but we are using just docker and using it only as a way to simplify the above. We are deploying 1 application to 1 system (EC2 via ASG). There is also nothing ke…

Sure, I agree that both Docker and k8s (at some level, k8s probably had to have a lot of that complexity to interface with Docker) are overengineered, and that there are better containerization processes/runtimes.

But I still don't think containers are what most people want. People need/want ultra-lightweight VMs with atomized state. NixOS looks promising but I haven't used it yet. It seems to give you a way to deterministically reason about your system without just shipping around blobs of the whole userland. You can also approximate this on other systems with a good scripting toolkit like Ansible.

Re: Tiny Linux distro that runs the entire OS as Docker containers

#42

Post by user5994461 »

zerocrates wrote: post #22
oneplane wrote: post #14

This is starting to smell like a system on top of a system to fix something that could be fixed in the system. Kind-of like implementing a filesystem on top op a filesystem... or putting a database on a filesystem to run another filesystem inside the database, or using a webbrowser as a runtime instead of an operating system.

This kind of thing happens when the base system is ubiquitous and therefore hard to change. It's easier to layer something on top of the base, where people can "opt in" and there's a large preexisting compatible audience. Changing the base layer itself at a minimum requires people to upgrade, and now you don't have that advantage of the preexisting audience anymore. If your improvement requires a breaking change, the…

There is an advantage in layering components, or building new software on top of existing components.

However, a minor improvement or bugfix should be done in the component that is responsible for it. Creating another layer instead of fixing the problem is just creating more problems.

Re: Tiny Linux distro that runs the entire OS as Docker containers

#43

Post by wmf »

frik wrote: post #20
gtrevorjay wrote: post #15

This is clearly a trend, though it remains to see if it will garner enough acceptance to actually be "the future". systemd supports launching container-based services via nspawn and already namespaces "legacy" services very heavily. In fact, systemd et al were among the heaviest early drivers of cgroup technology for cleaner starting and stopping of groups of processes.

I am starting to wonder, why not just execute processes directly with cgroups commands? $ cgcreate -g memory,cpu:groupname/foo $ cgexec -g memory,cpu:groupname/foo bash https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/cgroups It's the bare basic that libvirt and Docker et al are based anyway. So if you want to run just one process per "container" it seems rather logical to keep it simple and use cgroups commands directly. (Simil…

systemd already puts each service in a separate cgroup AFAIK, so commands like cgexec aren't even needed. I suspect people are more interested in namespace separation, but recent versions of systemd can also do that [1]. I don't think systemd has image management so that's still a reason to use Docker.

[1] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.exe...

Re: Tiny Linux distro that runs the entire OS as Docker containers

#44

Post by trhway »

oneplane wrote: post #14

This is starting to smell like a system on top of a system to fix something that could be fixed in the system. Kind-of like implementing a filesystem on top op a filesystem... or putting a database on a filesystem to run another filesystem inside the database, or using a webbrowser as a runtime instead of an operating system.

>Kind-of like implementing a filesystem on top op a filesystem

yep, when you want a distributed filesystem building it on top of a good and already working local filesystem is a pretty robust and cheap approach.

>smell like a system on top of a system to fix something that could be fixed in the system.

container layer is basically a distributed OS. Making a distributed OS by "fixing in the system" is pretty much non-starter ... or a huge academia project.

Re: Tiny Linux distro that runs the entire OS as Docker containers

#45

Post by rcarmo »

darren0 wrote: post #39

Creator of RancherOS here. Thanks for the interest in our tiny distro. RancherOS was created the beginning of 2015 and at the time was quite a novel concept. We strived to not just use container technologies in a Linux distro but actually package everything as standard Docker containers. Fast forward two years, what we were doing back then is now becoming the accepted practice. Most major distro are adopting more con…

Will there be an ARM version?

Re: Tiny Linux distro that runs the entire OS as Docker containers

#46

Post by wmf »

pikzen wrote: post #17
gtrevorjay wrote: post #15

This is clearly a trend, though it remains to see if it will garner enough acceptance to actually be "the future". systemd supports launching container-based services via nspawn and already namespaces "legacy" services very heavily. In fact, systemd et al were among the heaviest early drivers of cgroup technology for cleaner starting and stopping of groups of processes.

Unfortunately, systemd/nspawn does not benefit from the hype Docker garners, despite being infinitely better. This industry is becoming more and more hype and cargo-cult driven, instead of making sane technological choices

Being easier to try, having clear documentation/marketing, and having a bigger community are also forms of "better". If something is so infinitely technically better then winning is "just" a matter of creating on-ramps to ease its adoption.

Re: Tiny Linux distro that runs the entire OS as Docker containers

#47

Post by gtirloni »

cookiecaper wrote: post #41
eikenberry wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are suffering a bit from the over-engineering of Kubernetes and Docker and throwing the baby out with the bath water. Containers in general are great for simplifying deployment, development and testing. We use docker currently and it works great, but we are using just docker and using it only as a way to simplify the above. We are deploying 1 application to 1 system (EC2 via ASG). There is also nothing ke…

Sure, I agree that both Docker and k8s (at some level, k8s probably had to have a lot of that complexity to interface with Docker) are overengineered, and that there are better containerization processes/runtimes. But I still don't think containers are what most people want. People need/want ultra-lightweight VMs with atomized state. NixOS looks promising but I haven't used it yet. It seems to give you a way to deter…

It seems deploying thousands of ultra-lightweight VMs with atomized state would still require an orchestration layer. I don't follow how that would remove complexity and/or improve stability.

Re: Tiny Linux distro that runs the entire OS as Docker containers

#48

Post by [deleted] »

oneplane wrote: post #14

This is starting to smell like a system on top of a system to fix something that could be fixed in the system. Kind-of like implementing a filesystem on top op a filesystem... or putting a database on a filesystem to run another filesystem inside the database, or using a webbrowser as a runtime instead of an operating system.

[deleted]

Re: Tiny Linux distro that runs the entire OS as Docker containers

#49

Post by hobarrera »

KaiserPro wrote: post #2

for the ignorant, why would I want to wrap docker inside docker?

To separate all the OS-service containers, from the user-service containers.

I guess this is mostly so you don't accidentally delete OS-containers (like ntpd) when trying to delete all your containers.

Re: Tiny Linux distro that runs the entire OS as Docker containers

#50

Post by mschuster91 »

gumby wrote: post #34
lostmsu wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole notion of containers is basically this. That's why I am not sure why not just fix the OS. If there's anything to fix in the first place.

I always felt, perhaps uncharitably, that the point of containers was "those other programmers are idiots so we need to encapsulate everything for the sake of defense"

tbh, I see the security point in Docker as a huge risk. Basically you're depending on everyone in the chain to regularly recompile your images or you will get compromised eventually. There is no such thing as an apt-get dist-upgrade or any way to create real useful audit logs with Docker.

On the other hand, deploying stuff is dead easy now. You just tell the hoster "deploy this Docker package, expose port X as HTTP, and put a SSL offloader in the front" and that was it, no more "we need to deploy this" or countless hours spent with the hoster on how to get weird-framework-x to behave correctly.

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