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Comment by pliu | Hacker News Reader

The tone of this article is very upsetting. It begins with "I like to think I’m pretty alright at computers", but frankly I don't really agree that this is the case. Good at programming, maybe, but clearly not very good at ops.

Rather than accept that there are skills and experience they don't have, the author instead chooses to blame the entire world for their ignorance. The frustration on display is understandable and real and I totally get it, but the attitude is less forgivable.

Faced with a problem, instead stopping for a hot second to read some documentation, the author instead concludes that Docker is garbage, does some insane shit and then claims that the software industry has failed them. What incredible arrogance.

This article says way more about the character of this person than it does about the state of web app deployment.

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Sorry, I forgot to painstakingly document the innumerable hours I spent reading documentation (or trying to find critical documentation that didn't exist). I didn't think that would be a compelling read.

Indeed, not to make this a distro vs distro comment, but with a modern Arch install a few AUR scripts would eliminate (and automate) 50% of the problems here. The other 50% could easily be solved by investing time in becoming familiar with the technology he is working with, or not choosing newish unstable tech when his apparent preference is more suited towards established stable software that has been built (or evolved via usage) to run cleanly on a broad spectrum of systems.

But AUR scripts are limited to Arch and so pretty much a minority interest. Dockerfiles run pretty much anywhere.

Your reaction to "server software deployment could be better" is to scoff at the problems and ad-hom the author.

http://i.imgur.com/SMPYGEU.jpg

The author's reaction to "we've decided to try and simplify deployment of our hideously complex app" is to ignore the supported deployment, bury themselves neck deep in the guts of the complex deployment the devs worked to abstract away, and then rage about it. I'm not really seeing "server software deployment could be better" as a fair read of that.

His point is not "I don't know how to deploy a Rails app", it's "there is no standard way for a server program to tell the OS how what services to configure, or to query the OS for what services are available. Instead of fixing this, we wrap a pre-configured-OS-image and run it inside our OS. This is daft". As well as "the instructions are incorrect and incomplete, and that's normal".

e.g. Set aside the oddball tool breakage and consider that if you follow the instructions to the letter, this web forum requires: cloning (not installing!) the software’s source code and modifying it in-place. Copy-pasting hundreds of lines of configuration into nginx, as root, and hoping it doesn’t change when you upgrade. Installing non-default Postgres extensions, as root. Running someone else’s arbitrary database commands as a superuser.

and

You’d think that a web app could just have some metadata saying “I need Postgres and, optionally, Redis”, but this doesn’t exist. And the other side, where the system can enumerate the services it has available for a user, similarly doesn’t exist. So there’s no chance of discovery. If you’re missing a service the app needs but failed to document, or you set it up wrong, you’ll just find out on the first request.

and

"What we should have by now" section.

and

And I’m really not picking on Ruby, or Rails, or this particular app. I hate deploying my own web software, because there are so many parts all over the system that only barely know about each other, but if any of them fail then the whole shebang stops working.

Service discovery, orchestration, and on-the-fly config/environment changes are things that are solved by tools like consul and mesos (to scratch the surface). The ops world is so much more than just dockerfiles. There is absolutely a "chance of discovery". Using consul has helped us move to zero-configuration, discoverable microservices. Then for the more hobbyist stuff, there's docker-compose. Not looking into the options and ranting is not the same as there not being any options.

If you're lucky enough to run in a production environment that has zero configuration policy or minimum security requirements, then yes, granting your webapp superuser privs to the database mightn't be a deal-breaker.

For everyone else, it's giant shit sandwich, and a constant reminder that the project couldn't arsed untangling their own weird idiosyncrasies from their distributed app, and that this crap wouldn't fly with a traditional distro package, or wouldn't have mattered with the more traditional tarball/REQUIREMENTS/INSTALL.txt that made way fewer assumptions about the end-user's environment.

I love docker, but it's letting people get away with murder.

There is no ad hominem fallacy in that comment. You are probably misusing the term to refer to any negative comment about a person.

The ad hominem fallacy is a fallacy of irrelevance, of the form "the arguer's argument is invalid because the arguer has this negative quality," when the negative quality is irrelevant to the validity of the argument.

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