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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

#91

Post by dkarapetyan »

developer2 wrote: post #79
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.

It's nothing like that at all. It's just a minimal operating system with a small install image. The only special thing it does is replace the init process with a system-docker process to reduce the overhead of resources used by the operating system. The point isn't really to "run more Docker". It's to eliminate as much operating system overhead as possible, so that nearly every CPU cycle and byte of memory usage is d…

You realize how you're not making any sense. Docker is another abstraction so it can not be better in terms of resource usage than running whatever process you are now running inside docker. You literally have more overhead with the docker approach in terms of all resource utilization. You now have all the overhead of an OS and then you are layering docker on top of it. The OS has not gone away. It is still managing processes, memory, files, sockets, networking, etc.

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

#92

Post by wmf »

concede_pluto wrote: post #81
gunnihinn wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in a big company. It's much easier for us to spin up a container to run whatever experimental program we've thought might be useful to help us do our job than to provision a real box for it to run on or fit it into the whole bureaucracy. If it's actually useful we'll find someplace for it to live (or just in containers if that's all that's needed). If not, finding that out was cheap.

If you have machines with unused capacity, why would deploying a docker container image be easier than deploying a RPM package?

Because either there is no RPM or the RPM conflicts with other RPMs on the machine.

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

#93

Post by gumby »

gunnihinn wrote: post #76
gumby wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

I work in a big company. It's much easier for us to spin up a container to run whatever experimental program we've thought might be useful to help us do our job than to provision a real box for it to run on or fit it into the whole bureaucracy. If it's actually useful we'll find someplace for it to live (or just in containers if that's all that's needed). If not, finding that out was cheap.

This is a more charitable interpretation of what I meant: "we can quickly test the value of an idea via a prototype without the cost of making it super well behaved in other areas." Which is an excellent application of containers!

I just sometimes wonder if the cart hasn't gotten in front of the horse on the whole container front. The fact that the term "bare iron" has been hijacked to mean "not under virtualization" made me start to think that something is seriously fucked up.

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

#94

Post by gumby »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #90
gunnihinn wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in a big company. It's much easier for us to spin up a container to run whatever experimental program we've thought might be useful to help us do our job than to provision a real box for it to run on or fit it into the whole bureaucracy. If it's actually useful we'll find someplace for it to live (or just in containers if that's all that's needed). If not, finding that out was cheap.

So you have an organizational problem and you're hacking one problem with another hack. Clearly nothing can go wrong with this approach.

I don't see that as an organizational problem, but a way to try something out safely and faster.

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

#95

Post by dkarapetyan »

gumby wrote: post #94
dkarapetyan wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you have an organizational problem and you're hacking one problem with another hack. Clearly nothing can go wrong with this approach.

I don't see that as an organizational problem, but a way to try something out safely and faster.

I was referring to how they are unable to provision the right resources to run experiments because of all the red tape and they are getting around the issue by using docker. What happens when the red tape guard get wind of this?

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

#96

Post by lobster_johnson »

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"

One huge benefit of containers is that you can treat a program as something atomic: Delete the container and it's gone, as if it were never installed.

Modern package management systems like APT spend a lot of effort installing and removing files, and they don't do it completely; any file created by a program after it is installed will not be tracked.

You could accomplish the same thing in other ways (as Apple's sandboxing tech does), of course.

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

#97

Post by hamburglar »

dozzie wrote: post #80
gunnihinn wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in a big company. It's much easier for us to spin up a container to run whatever experimental program we've thought might be useful to help us do our job than to provision a real box for it to run on or fit it into the whole bureaucracy. If it's actually useful we'll find someplace for it to live (or just in containers if that's all that's needed). If not, finding that out was cheap.

You do realize that the scenario you have described could be carried out with chroot just as easily, right? The only way "containers" help (and not containers as is, but Docker specifically) is that they ship the whole chroot OS image with all the dependencies.

I think the "just as easily" is highly debatable. I'm not a container evangelist by any stretch, but if you were going to take a "just chroot it" approach, the very first thing you'd want to do to ease the operational burden is define some kind of standard app packaging format that defines what's in the chroot and an entry point and an environment, and maybe some scheme for mapping external data and various other niceties you get with containers, and at that point, congratulations, you've reinvented containers.

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

#98

Post by dkarapetyan »

wmf wrote: post #92
concede_pluto wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have machines with unused capacity, why would deploying a docker container image be easier than deploying a RPM package?

Because either there is no RPM or the RPM conflicts with other RPMs on the machine.

Sounds like then you should learn what a chroot is. All the existing linux platforms already provide the solution to your exact problem with much less overhead than docker.

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

#99

Post by zzzcpan »

jacques_chester wrote: post #86
zzzcpan wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and this orchestration layer is supposed to be designed for resilience and stability from the start, because it's an architectural problem that cannot be fixed later without a complete redesign of everything. There is one such proven architecture - supervision trees and it addresses both problems: complexity and stability. VMs are not even necessary for this, nor are cloud platforms.

I think at this point it's accepted that supervision trees are an app or runtime concern. Operating systems and distributed platforms have to support a wider range of architectural patterns. Disclosure: I work on a cloud platform, Cloud Foundry, on behalf of Pivotal.

Supervision trees have enough flexibility to support any architecture pattern imaginable, you got it kind of backwards. They are like trees of arbitrary architecture patterns. The idea is to limit the scope of any possible problem, so that it only affects a tiny part of the system, but at the same time reducing complexity by only having to deal with little responsibility in each supervisor. Kind of a tiny orchestration system for each service, instead of a centralized one.

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

#100

Post by dozzie »

hamburglar wrote: post #97
dozzie wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that the scenario you have described could be carried out with chroot just as easily, right? The only way "containers" help (and not containers as is, but Docker specifically) is that they ship the whole chroot OS image with all the dependencies.

I think the "just as easily" is highly debatable. I'm not a container evangelist by any stretch, but if you were going to take a "just chroot it" approach, the very first thing you'd want to do to ease the operational burden is define some kind of standard app packaging format that defines what's in the chroot and an entry point and an environment, and maybe some scheme for mapping external data and various other nic…

> I think the "just as easily" is highly debatable.

Heads up, you're talking about a different thing. You want to run these things as normal operations, but gunnihinn was talking about deploying an application to check if it is of any value. Chroot is just enough to make a mess as the application's developer instructed in INSTALL.txt without the need to worry about cleaning up afterwards.

And by the way, you seem to be confusing containers and Docker.

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