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I ditched Docker for Podman

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481–490 of 670 posts

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#481
post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I genuinely don't understand what docker brings to the table. I mean, I get the value prop. But it's really not that hard to set up http on vanilla Ubuntu (or God forbid, OpenBSD) and not really have issues. Sounds great if you're only running a single web server or whatever. My team builds a fairly complex system that's comprised of ~45 unique services. Those services are managed by different teams with slightly d…

[flagged]

what they described is a fairly common set up in damn near most enterprises

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a summary of those most common issues and their workarounds?

Broadly, the claim that Podman is a drop-in replacement for Docker is true only for the simple cases, but people have developed assorted dependencies on Docker implementation details. Examples: 1. People hear about how great rootless is with Podman but then expect to be able to switch directly from rootful Docker to rootless Podman without changing anything. The only way that could work is if there was no difference…

This is a great summary, thank you!

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#483
I ditched containers. After a few years it seemed like one of those things that FAANGs use because they need it, while most others are using it just because the FAANGs do.

I'm sure I've spent more time writing and troubleshooting YAML files than I ever did just installing stuff on vm's.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#484
post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They publish statically-linked binaries on GitHub [0], so to install it, you just need to download and unpack a single file. But you don't get any automatic updates like you would if they provided an apt repository. [0]: https://github.com/containers/podman/releases

how come there is no podman Linux installer?

Well all the downstream distros have their own installers (apt, dnf, pacman, etc.). If you're compiling from source, then "make install" [0] should work as expected, and if you're downloading the pre-built binaries from GitHub [1], you just need to copy a single statically-linked binary into "/usr/local/bin".

[0]: https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/c8183c50/Makefile#...

[1]: https://github.com/containers/podman/releases

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#485
post #415

Back in 2001/2002, I was charged with building a WiFi hotspot box. I was a fan of OpenBSD and wanted to slim down our deployment, which was running on Python, to avoid having to copy a ton of unnecessary files to the destination systems. I also wanted to avoid dependency-hell. Naturally, I turned to `chroot` and the jails concept. My deployment code worked by running the software outside of the jail environment and m…

The best CI/CD pipeline I ever used was my first freelance deployment using Django. I didn't have a clue what I was doing and had to phone a friend. We set up a git post receive hook which built static files and restarted httpd on a git receive. Deployment was just 'git push live master'. While I've used Docker a lot since then, that remains the single easiest deployment I've ever had. I genuinely don't understand wh…

> I didn't have a clue what I was doing and had to phone a friend.

> I genuinely don't understand what docker brings to the table.

I think you invalidated your own opinion here

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#486
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best CI/CD pipeline I ever used was my first freelance deployment using Django. I didn't have a clue what I was doing and had to phone a friend. We set up a git post receive hook which built static files and restarted httpd on a git receive. Deployment was just 'git push live master'. While I've used Docker a lot since then, that remains the single easiest deployment I've ever had. I genuinely don't understand wh…

Reproducibility? No. Not having to regularly rebuild the whole dev environment because I need to work on one particular Python app once a quarter and its build chain reliably breaks other stuff? Priceless.

Use pixi or uv to maintain this specific environment and separate it from the global one

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This false sense of reproducability is why I funded https://docs.stablebuild.com/ some years ago. It lets you pin stuff in dockerfiles that are normally unpinnable like OS package repos, docker hub tags and random files on the internet. So you can go back to a project a year from now and actually get the same container back again.

Isn't this problem usually solved by building an actual image for your specific application, tagging that and pushing to some docker repo? At least that's how it's been at placec I've worked at that used docker. What am I missing?

Builds typically aren’t retained forever.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#488

I may be the odd man out, but after getting unbelievably stressed out by containers, k8s, etc., I couldn't believe how zen just spinning up a new VPS and bootstrapping it with a bash script was. That combined with systemd scripts can get you relatively far without all of the (cognitive) overhead. The best part? Whenever there's an "uh oh," you just SSH in to a box, patch it, and carry on about your business.

> you just SSH in to a box, patch it Oh god. I can’t imagine how I could build reliably software if this is what I was doing. How do you know what “patches” are needed to run your software?

A staging server?

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#489
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies aren't monoliths, they're made of teams. Big companies are made of teams of teams. The little teams don't really get to make purchasing decisions. If there's a free alternative, little teams just have to suck it up and try to make it work. --- Also consider that many of these expenses are born by the 'cost center' side of the house, that is, the people who don't make money for the company. If you work in a…

It always amazes me how hostile most large companies are to paying for developer tools that have a trivial cost. Then they will approve the budget for some yay quartly profit party no one cares about that cost $100k for the venue rental alone. I do understand that this mostly is because management wants staff to be replaceable and disposable having specialty tools suggests that a person can be unique.

No, it's not because of that. It's because:

1. You want to control spend - there are budgets. 2. You want to control accounting - minimize the number of vendors you work with. Each billing needs to come with an invoice, these need to be managed, when a developer leaves you need to cancel their seat etc. It's a pain. 3. You want to control compliance - are these tools safe? Are they accessing sensitive data? Are they audited? 4. You want to control interoperability between teams. Can't have it become a zoo of bring-your-own stuff.

So free tools get around all of these, you can just wing it under the radar and if the tool becomes prominent enough then you go fight the war to have it adopted. Once there's spend, you need to get into line. And that line makes a lot of sense when you're into 30 developers, let alone hundreds.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#490
> I literally just aliased docker=podman in my shell and carried on with life.

Thanks, I hate it. It might look fine at first but once you need anything more advanced than running a hello world container, it falls apart. Fun fact, there is no set of flags that would correctly build a multi-platform image on both Docker and Podman -- I found out the hard way.

I guess Podman may work if you go all in on it, but pretending that it's a drop-in replacement for Docker will bring you only pain.

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