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I ditched Docker for Podman

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Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#581

Post by nickjj »

taormina wrote: post #333
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…

Yep! What startup has the goal of making less than $10 million in annual revenue? That sentence was absolutely a deal breaker for the CEO and CTO of our last company. And since when has Docker Desktop "just worked"?

I've been using Docker since before Docker Desktop.

Never really had any major problems with Docker Desktop on Windows. I run it and it allows me to run containers through WSL 2. Volume performance is near native Linux speeds and the software itself doesn't crash, even on my 10 year old machine.

I also use it on macOS on a work laptop for a lot of different projects and it works. There's more issues around volume mount performance here but it's not something that's unusably slow. Also given the volume performance is mostly due to OS level file system things I'm skeptical Podman would resolve that. I remember trying Colima for something and it made no difference there.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#582

Post by nickjj »

phaedrix wrote: post #496
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…

You are off by a factor of 12. It's $9 per month not year.

Thanks, I can't believe I missed that!

$90 vs $1,080 would be the difference anually.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#583

Post by lmm »

zmmmmm wrote: post #562
lmm wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do when you then actually need to make a change to your application (e.g. a 1-liner fix)? Edit the binary image?

you append it to the end of the docker file so that the previous image is still valid with its cached build steps

And just keep accreting new layers indefinitely?

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#584

Post by lmm »

xylophile wrote: post #545
lmm wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do when you then actually need to make a change to your application (e.g. a 1-liner fix)? Edit the binary image?

You can always edit the file in the container and re-upload it with a different tag. That's not best practice, but it's not exactly sorcery.

It's not, but at that point you're giving up on most of the things Docker was supposed to get you. What about when you need to upgrade a library dependency (but not all of them, just that one)?

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#585

Post by bolobo »

sroerick wrote: post #507
bolobo wrote: post #447

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. For me, as an ex-ops, the value proposition is to be able to package a complex stack made of one or more db, several services and tools (ours and external), + describe the interface of these services with the s…

OK, I completely agree with this. That said, I'm not a nix guy, but to me, intuitively NixOS wins for this use case. It seems like you could either A. Use declarative OS installs across deployments B. Put your app into a container which sometimes deploys it's own kernel and then sometimes doesn't and this gets pushed to a third party cloud registry, or you can set up your own registry, and then this container runs on…

The end result will be the same but I can give 3 docker commands to a new hire and they will be able to set up the stack on their MacBook or Linux or Windows system in 10 minutes.

Nix is, as far as I know, not there and we would probably need weeks of training to get the same result.

Most of the time the value of a solution is not in its technical perfection but in how many people already know it, documentation, and more important all the dumb tooling that's around it!

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#586

Post by rglullis »

sroerick wrote: post #512
rcv wrote: 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…

OK, this seems like an absolutely valid use case. Big enterprise microservice architecture, I get it. If you have islands of dev teams, and a dedicated CI/CD dev ops team, then this makes more sense. But this puts you in a league with some pretty advanced deployment tools, like high level K8, Ansible, cloud orchestration work, and nobody thinks those tools are really that appropriate for the majority of devteams. Peo…

Imagine you have a team of devs, some using macOS, some using Debian, some using NixOS, some on Windows + WSL. Go ahead and try to make sure that everyone's development environment by simply running "git pull" and "make dev"

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#587

Post by znpy »

em-bee wrote: post #540
a012 wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having a reproducible dev environment is great when everyone’s laptop is different and may be running different OSes, libraries, runtimes, etc. Docker and other containerization solved the “it works on my machine” issue

almost. there is still an issue with selinux. i just had that case. because the client develops with selinux turned off, the docker containers don't run on my machine if i have selinux turned on.

you miss an intermediate environment (staging, pre-prod, canary, whatever you want to call it) with selinux turned on.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#588

Post by Fanmade »

rglullis wrote: post #586
sroerick wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, this seems like an absolutely valid use case. Big enterprise microservice architecture, I get it. If you have islands of dev teams, and a dedicated CI/CD dev ops team, then this makes more sense. But this puts you in a league with some pretty advanced deployment tools, like high level K8, Ansible, cloud orchestration work, and nobody thinks those tools are really that appropriate for the majority of devteams. Peo…

Imagine you have a team of devs, some using macOS, some using Debian, some using NixOS, some on Windows + WSL. Go ahead and try to make sure that everyone's development environment by simply running "git pull" and "make dev"

Ha, I've written a lot of these Makefiles and the "make dev" command even became a personal standard that I added to each project. I don't know if I read about that, or if it just developed into that because it just makes sense. In the last few years, these commands very often started a docker container, though. I do tend to work on Windows with WSL and I most of my colleagues use macOS or Linux, so that's definitely one of the reasons why docker is just easier there.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#589

Post by Kovah »

vbezhenar wrote: post #452
mrighele wrote: post #42

> If your Docker Compose workflow is overly complex, just convert it to Kubernetes YAML. We all use Kubernetes these days, so why even bother about this? I find that kubernetes yaml are a lot more complex than docker compose. And while I do, no, not everybody uses kubernetes.

I disagree with you on that. Kubernetes YAML is on the same level of complexity as docker compose and sometimes even easier. But verbosity - yeah, kubernetes is absolutely super-verbose. Some 100-line docker-compose could easily end up as 20 yamls of 50 lines each. kubectl really needs some sugar to convert yamls from simple form to verbose and back.

> Kubernetes YAML is on the same level of complexity as docker compose

> Some 100-line docker-compose could easily end up as 20 yamls of 50 lines each.

Yeah, nothin to add here.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#590

Post by regularfry »

SushiMon wrote: post #353
regularfry wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deal breaker for us too, now in my second org where that's been true. It's not just that you need a licence now, it's that even if we took it to procurement, until it actually got done we'd be at risk of them turning up with a list of IP addresses and saying "are you going to pay for all of these installs, then?". It's just a stupid position to get into. The Docker of today might not have a record of doing that, but…

Were there any missing/worse functional capabilities that drove you over to Podman/alternatives? Or just the licensing / pricing?

No, it was entirely a business decision in both cases.
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