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Containers Don't Solve Everything

blog.deref.io

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Re: Containers Don't Solve Everything

#2

Post by kendru »

Author here. I have been developing Docker applications for years now, and while the experience is better than it used to be, it's still not great. I work for Deref, which is working on developer tooling that is more amenable to modern development workflows. We'd love to hear what pains you have with the current state of development environments.

Re: Containers Don't Solve Everything

#3

Post by superkuh »

It depends on the context, I don't know about corporate persons with profit incentives but if we're talking human persons then containers don't solve anything. They're just the symptom of the disease that is future shock. The underlying libraries we depend on just change too fast now and no devs care about forwards compatibility so we end up with all OS/Distros having libs that stop working in about a year (or more like 3 months with Rust/JS/etc).

The solution has to either come in the form of static compilation, or, even less feasible, getting devs to actually care if their software runs on platforms more than a year old. Containers just make everything worse in all cases beyond the contrived "it just worked and I never need to change anything".

Re: Containers Don't Solve Everything

#8

Post by encryptluks2 »

This looks more like an advertisement than a useful blog post.

Also:

> Consider also that Docker relies on Linux kernel-specific features to implement containers, so users of macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, and other operating systems still need a virtualization layer.

First, FreeBSD has its own native form of containers and Windows has its own native implementation. Docker != containers.

I really don't see how Docker (or containers as we mostly know them) relying on kernel-features from an open source operating system in order to run Linux OS images as something to even complain about, and there is nothing preventing Mac from implementing their own form of containers.

Re: Containers Don't Solve Everything

#9

Post by encryptluks2 »

superkuh wrote: post #3

It depends on the context, I don't know about corporate persons with profit incentives but if we're talking human persons then containers don't solve anything. They're just the symptom of the disease that is future shock. The underlying libraries we depend on just change too fast now and no devs care about forwards compatibility so we end up with all OS/Distros having libs that stop working in about a year (or more l…

I don't think dependencies is the only benefit of containers. I personally like the isolation they provide and generally prefer running services in containers, even if they are using the same dependencies as my OS. I run Linux too, so I don't have to worry about any virtualization framework overhead.

Re: Containers Don't Solve Everything

#10

Post by ryanmarsh »

kendru wrote: post #2

Author here. I have been developing Docker applications for years now, and while the experience is better than it used to be, it's still not great. I work for Deref, which is working on developer tooling that is more amenable to modern development workflows. We'd love to hear what pains you have with the current state of development environments.

How do "modern development workflows" differ?
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