We have "save your wallet hundreds of thousands by not automatically spinning up a crapton of resources if your app does an oopsie"! And we have "simply run on any public cloud or in your own datacenter with MAAS or locally with LXD"!
For real though, containerization isn't the only way to separate applications from each other but totally fine, it's the "It works on my machine, so here's my machine" mentality that doesn't fill me with confidence. I've seen too much barely-working jank in containers that probably only get updated when a new version of the containerized application itself is released.
I like containers. But they do have a habit of nurturing cludgy temporary hacks into permanent infrastructure, by sweeping all the ugly bits under the big whale-shaped rug.
What gets me is people migrating from VMs treating it like an entire host machine.
There is a lack of knowledge among developers regarding precompiling assets and classes (if interpreted), and people are trying to do too much in startup scripts.
Another thing I hate is wrapping the entire process in a script because people want to kill the main process without restarting the container. Yikes!
Virtualization was supposed to reduce the overhead, not create entire DevOps departments.
Years of containerization yet no real use over make clean; make build
Wanted to deploy your app in the "cloud" anyways for a laugh? We had a tool for it, it's called rsync
Let's run a virtual container in --privileged mode, so we can manage system resources from it -- Statements dreamt up by utterly Deranged
Look at what tech interviews have been demanding your Respect for all these years.
(These are real documentation examples for how a simple virtualization supposedly works)
Docker is still useful even for apps that compile to a single executable, as the app may still depend on a particular environment setup, particular libraries being available, etc.
I would vote for docker as well. The last time I had to inherit a system that ran on virtual machines, it was quite a pain to figure out how the software was installed, what was where in the file system, and where all the configuration was coming from. Replicating that setup took months of preparation.
By contrast, with Docker, all your setup is documented. The commands that were used to install our software into the virtual machines and were long gone are present right there in the Docker file. And building the code? An even bigger win for Docker. In the VM project, the build environment for the C++ portion of our codebase was configured by about a dozen environment variables, none of which were documented. If it were built in Docker, all the necessary environment variables would have been right there in the build environment. Not to mention the build commands themselves would be there too, whereas with VMs, we would often have developers build locally and then copy it into the VM, which was terrible for reproducibility and onboarding new developers.
That said, this all comes down to execution - a well-managed VM system can easily be much better than a poorly managed Docker system. But in general, I feel that Docker tends to be easier to work with than a VM. While Docker is far from flawless, there are a lot more things that can make life harder with VMs, at least from my experience.
(Chorus)
Heave ho, Docker, and sail the binary sea,
With containers all lined up, so light and free.
From the code to the cloud, we'll go with ease,
In our trusty Docker ships, we sail the seas.
(Verse 1)
Oh, the devs were a-struggling, in a stormy plight,
With dependencies broken, things weren't quite right.
Then Docker sailed in, with a promise so bold,
Of consistent environments, as good as gold.
(Chorus)
Heave ho, Docker, and sail the binary sea,
With containers all lined up, so light and free.
From the code to the cloud, we'll go with ease,
In our trusty Docker ships, we sail the seas.
(Verse 2)
We build and we ship, with our Docker compose,
In our microservices, our confidence grows.
With images light and containers so tight,
We deploy in the morning, and sleep sound at night.
(Chorus)
Heave ho, Docker, and sail the binary sea,
With containers all lined up, so light and free.
From the code to the cloud, we'll go with ease,
In our trusty Docker ships, we sail the seas.
I see people not happy with Docker as a company, and, I get that, tech co. Lol
But I gotta admit, it's definitely been awesome for self hosting. My home server would probably just be OpenMediaVault and a Samba share if I couldn't just spin up compose files and had to worry about every app wanting its own database and stuff!
Are there better alternatives for newbs who just wanna self host stuff?
Are there better alternatives for newbs who just wanna self host stuff?
Docker is great for a beginner, and even for an expert too. I've been self-hosting for 20 years and love Docker.
Back in "the old days", we'd use Linux-VServer to containerize stuff. It was a bit like LXC is today. You get a container that shares the same kernel, and have to install an OS inside it. The Docker approach of having an immutable container and all data stored in separate volumes was a game changer. It makes upgrades so much simpler since it can just throw away the container and build a new one.
The main alternative to Docker is Podman. Podman uses the same images/containers as Docker - technically they're "OCI containers" and both Docker and Podman implement the OCI spec.
Podman's architecture is different. The main difference with Podman is that it never runs as root, so it's better for security. With Docker, you can either run it as root or in rootless mode, but the default is running it as root.
That's one of my dilemmas. Due to using BSD and relying on jails I have a hard time using lots of possibly nice apps being released nowadays because they only offer the docker way of installing.
If you're doing it right, containers are less like VMs and more like cgroups. If orchestrated correctly it uses less system resources to run lots of services on a single system/node.
That said, I'm a devops/infrastructure/network professional and not a developer, so maybe I'm missing something from the dev experience.... But I love containers.
Docker does kinda suck now, though. Use podman or another interface instead if you can help it.
I've seen many a terrible containerized monolithic app.
I've seen plenty of self-hosters complain when an app needs multiple containers, to the point where people make unofficial containers containing everything. I used to get downvoted a LOT on Reddit when I commented saying that separating individual systems/daemons into separate containers is the best practice with Docker.
I don't like containerisation because it leads to bullshit like atomic distros. I don't want a spicy Android.
Steam OS has some cool elements like the menu, the in-game side panels and the game mode/desktop dichotomy, but incremental rolling release is utterly deranged from my POV as an Arch user (btw).
Say Plasma "breaks" - a wiki will not help fast enough.
I'm not trying to defend rolling release for a gaming console, but give me at least the option to decide for myself whether I'm ok with breakage or not. There is this kernelspace NT driver that I wanted to try, but I couldn't because pacman is locked.
I'm currently trying Fedora Kinoite and from the get go the hassle of getting a proper Firefox+codecs to watch online videos feels like a major step back.
Then you have the issue of installing software in flatpack (is: vscode, texmaker) that are either not fully working of need to have their access tweaked. Atomic distros appeal is to "just work" it doesn't seem like it does.
hahahahahahaj I don't know if it is funny because it is absurd or if it is funny because there are some folks out there that really think like that hahahahah
This meme format works best to absurdly overstate the uselessness of something you find mildly annoying. That's when it's funniest, because the criticisms are grounded in something real, and the low-stakes controversy makes the aggressive tone funny in context.
I've recently spent a fair amount of time trying to peel my blog away from my existing framework due to how much I hated using docker to just build a website, it doesn't need to be this heavyweight.
I just put my docker services in a lxc container. Docker is neat and lets me deploy shit without having to worry. Works pretty well, just remember to put your lxc containers on your SSD and not your raid mass storage (my hdds have errors now, fuck)