Buildpacks vs. Dockerfiles
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Buildpacks vs. Dockerfiles
1–10 of 91 posts
Re: Buildpacks vs. Dockerfiles
#2Finally some simplification in the development tooling!
Re: Buildpacks vs. Dockerfiles
#3Which advantages does buildpacks offer vs Dockerfiles?
> Familiarity with Docker and Dockerfile syntax is not universal. Even those with experience may not be equipped to write a Dockerfile that can quickly build (and rebuild) a small and secure image.
Are there any others besides writing a dockerfile?
(which can be non-trivial, I'm not underestimating it)
Re: Buildpacks vs. Dockerfiles
#4Finally some simplification in the development tooling!
Buildpacks have been in the industry for many years (thanks to cloud foundry) but it doesn't really scale. For simple things, sure they are good enough but more often than not you want to your application to be packed in a special way and you end up putting more efforts than using simple Dockerfiles
Re: Buildpacks vs. Dockerfiles
#5During the last 3 years I've had the pleasure of using Bazel's rules_docker to generate all my container images (https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_docker).
In a nutshell, rules_docker is a set of build rules for the Bazel build system (https://bazel.build). What's pretty nice about these rules is that they don't rely on a Docker daemon. They are rules that directly construct image tarballs that you can either load into your local Docker daemon or push to a registry.
What's nice about this approach is that image generation works on any operating system. For example, even on a Mac or Windows system that doesn't have Docker installed, you're able to build Linux containers. They are also fully reproducible, meaning that you often don't need to upload layers when pushing (either because they haven't changed, or because some colleague/CI job already pushed those layers).
I guess rules_docker works fine for a variety of programming languages. I've mainly used it with Go, though.
Re: Buildpacks vs. Dockerfiles
#6Which advantages does buildpacks offer vs Dockerfiles? > Familiarity with Docker and Dockerfile syntax is not universal. Even those with experience may not be equipped to write a Dockerfile that can quickly build (and rebuild) a small and secure image. Are there any others besides writing a dockerfile? (which can be non-trivial, I'm not underestimating it)
This sounds like just moving the problem. The author makes it seem like writing a Dockerfile is somehow such a burden on development teams when in reality it's a rounding error on the overall development time spent on a project. Ours is about five lines long. Copy the files, define some environment variables and a port, done. Not exactly rocket science.
Part of the problem stems from trying to roll CI into the Dockerfile. Not a thing if you use, Travis-CI, Github Actions, the Gitlab equivalent of that, Google Cloudbuild, AWS Build, etc. Because it's all externalized there. Creating good pipelines with those is a bit of work but also nothing major.
They all follow the same pattern: build pipelines defined in json or yaml that define steps that are effectively dockerized build tools. The only problem your project Dockerfile should solve is copying the output of that pipeline to the container.
I guess a build pack would try to "standardize" CI/CD in the context of a very specific deploy environment and CI environment. Standardizing something that specific has limited value though. What would make sense at this point are dockerized build steps that work in most or all of the above CI systems. They all solve more or less the same problems in a very similar way. But of course where it gets complicated is the deep integration with the stuff outside the build system (cloud specific components, secret management, networking, deployment clusters, etc.).
Re: Buildpacks vs. Dockerfiles
#7Which advantages does buildpacks offer vs Dockerfiles? > Familiarity with Docker and Dockerfile syntax is not universal. Even those with experience may not be equipped to write a Dockerfile that can quickly build (and rebuild) a small and secure image. Are there any others besides writing a dockerfile? (which can be non-trivial, I'm not underestimating it)
This sounds like just moving the problem. The author makes it seem like writing a Dockerfile is somehow such a burden on development teams when in reality it's a rounding error on the overall development time spent on a project. Ours is about five lines long. Copy the files, define some environment variables and a port, done. Not exactly rocket science. Part of the problem stems from trying to roll CI into the Docker…
I think that Buildpacks help when your Dockerfile is actually complex due to application's dependencies or build process.
I worked at a company where we used a multi-stage build Dockerfile that was quite long and tedious to maintain and developers would avoid keeping it up-to-date.
There is also another point when developers are used to PaaS such as Heroku that already handles the "build burden" for them and thus Buildpacks may ease the transition to using Dockerfile-based builds (if needed of course).
Re: Buildpacks vs. Dockerfiles
#8What are some hosting providers providing build packages support?
Google and Heroku were mentioned in the article. I've also had a good experience with self-managed Dokku deployment. Are there any managed service providers that support buildpack deployment?
Re: Buildpacks vs. Dockerfiles
#9Which advantages does buildpacks offer vs Dockerfiles? > Familiarity with Docker and Dockerfile syntax is not universal. Even those with experience may not be equipped to write a Dockerfile that can quickly build (and rebuild) a small and secure image. Are there any others besides writing a dockerfile? (which can be non-trivial, I'm not underestimating it)
I think there is rarely a reason to choose this over just a standard Dockerfile, which is usually not that complicated and probably wont change much over time once it has been implemented.
If generating Dockerfiles needs to be scaled up somehow, I can understand why this would be useful. Sounds exactly like a problem someone like Heroku would have.
Re: Buildpacks vs. Dockerfiles
#10What are some hosting providers providing build packages support? Google and Heroku were mentioned in the article. I've also had a good experience with self-managed Dokku deployment. Are there any managed service providers that support buildpack deployment?
If you use a third-party builder like Paketo you can use buildpacks anywhere you can use docker images