Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimktrains2 | Hacker News Reader

Or they can move to one of the BSDs and use jails which are much more stable, secure, and tested than linux containers.

Rocket is not limited to Linux containers. It can also run in VMs. Incidentally there are also solutions to run Docker containers in VMs (Rocket itself should able to, but there are others as well, like hyper.sh)

> stable, secure, and tested

That is true, however jails lose a lot of power without VIMAGE. VIMAGE is not enabled by default yet, and it's pretty unstable (I use it). I really wish VIMAGE would mature, but we're not there yet.

Technology isn't that important here, it's what stems from it is. Adoption, infrastructure, tools, community.

There's also a price for doing it differently. And believe you me, using BSD nowadays is the definition of doing things differently. What for? What I'm getting for losing my time and reinventing the tools that are already available and much more polished?

Dockerfiles can be replicated. Docker Hub can be replicated. Missing things can be compiled from sources, probably. But all that costs time for little to no gain.

You do realise that "different" platforms can still be popular enough to have a lot of the same ecosystems. Hell, Docker itself used to be the "alternative"; not even that long ago in fact.

FreeBSD might only have a fraction of the community that Linux does, but that's still a pretty large number of developers and sysadmins in real world terms.

Disclosure: I run both FreeBSD and Linux systems.

There are also some interesting systems build on top of jails. I'm starting to use iocage, which uses both ZFS and jails to manage and create systems with great ease. Better or worse than Docker? It's different. It does some things docker does not, and vice versa. I'm currently in the evaluation stage, and it's likely I'll be using it to replace hand built jails running PostgreSQL, builds and other single-purpose tasks.

And your point is? A suggestion to switch to BSD and jails for an average user of Docker is laughable.

Well if someone is competent enough to create a Docker image then it's not a great stretch to assume many of them would also be competent enough to create a jail. And FreeBSD is just as easy to use as Linux (actually, I generally find it easier to administrate than Linux since things are more rigorously laid out. But a lot of that is also down to my own personal preference).

At the end of the day, both Jails and Docker are well documented. So even the people only interested in blindly copying and pasting commands should be able do the basics.

The real problem FreeBSD and jails face isn't with support nor accessibility but rather dumb prejudice. Much like why many Windows users think Linux is difficult. If you spend your whole time shouting that your way of doing things is the best then you're never going to give anything else a fair chance.

You're missing the point. Even if jails is the most elegant, easy and powerful technology in the world it's still on BSD. People are not going to switch to BSD just because of jails. Sure, then can use both, but why?

Docker and linux containers in general made things easier and more accessible for many. Switching from that to jails doesn't make sense.

> You're missing the point. Even if jails is the most elegant, easy and powerful technology in the world it's still on BSD. People are not going to switch to BSD just because of jails.

We're not just talking about jails though. The OP was discussing systemd + containers. Switching to FreeBSD to escape systemd isn't that weird of an idea since most of the same Linux software will also run on FreeBSD. In fact I'm seriously considering switching my Debian 7 (Wheezy) servers over to FreeBSD rather than upgrade to Debian 8 (Jessie) and have deal with systemd. Anecdotally I've read other people consider switching away from Linux as well

You might like systemd and Dockers. That's great. But that's your personal preference. You shouldn't be so surprised when other people might prefer to run the same software but on a different platform.

On a tangent note: I also have a bunch of existing systemd systems - RHEL servers, ArchLinux desktops, etc - that I'm very happy with and intend to keep running Linux. I make this point just to emphasise that I'm not anti-Linux nor a FreeBSD fanboy. Just someone who's platform agnostic.

> Sure, then can use both, but why?

Why not? This isn't a sports team where you're expected to only support one product. It's quite possible to use multiple different technologies based on whatever fits a specific purpose better.

> Why not? This isn't a sports team where you're expected to only support one product.

Linux/Docker and BSD/jails aren't even in the same league.

> Linux/Docker and BSD/jails aren't even in the same league.

Since you don't have any basis for comparison, I'm going to have to assume that you're now just trolling me. So I'll end our correspondence here.

Have you used both jails and Docker? Saying docker is a much more polished option doesn't match my experience. Yes, it has more features, but with these features come more bugs. Some of them are minor annoyances. Some are of the "our infrastructure is fucked until we switch our storage driver" kind.

Sometimes, stability is a gain.

I'm not comparing Docker and jails, I'm talking about things around. Stackoverflow.com coverage, blogs posts and guides, github repos, publicly available images, etc.

> And believe you me, using BSD nowadays is the definition of doing things differently.

... although people like Florian Haas argue that the way that one does things on the BSDs is actually the way that makes sense to do things with Docker, as well, and the way that you think to be "different" is actually the sensible way overall.

* https://plus.google.com/+FlorianHaas/posts/4xjQP1q6DEN

* https://www.hastexo.com/blogs/florian/2016/02/21/containers-...

Choosing BSD instead of Linux is "doing things differently". I'm talking about popularity and what it means in this whole comment tree, not about technical merits.

That's basically the argument to use Windows and Windows-based technology and not Linux. Everything you can do on any of the UNIX boxes, you can do with Windows. It might be different, but it is still a more popular / supported platform.

Since I'm not a Windows fan, I find value in doing it differently, and so have Linux fans. I think you will find FreeBSD and SmartOS users find the cost in time to bring a large enough gain to satisfy their business requirements.

> That's basically the argument to use Windows and Windows-based technology and not Linux.

Not today it isn't. Years, maybe decades ago it could be.

What Linux containers do is help to remove the barrier that various distributions introduced, it makes things more accessible and it's more lightweight than using virtualization. Centos, Alpine, Ubuntu, whatever. As long as it is in a container I can work with it. I can even run some Windows binaries with Wine inside a container. rkt is largely compatible with Docker infrastructure, so that too is fine.

But what jimktrains2 suggesting is complete opposite of that, it reduces options.

> But what jimktrains2 suggesting is complete opposite of that, it reduces options.

Personally I'd consider having familiarity with more than one platform would increase one's options.

But ultimately having other solutions on the market is a good thing. Not only because no one solution is the best at every metric (be it stability, security, speed, memory usage, nor any specific requirements), nor because different solutions can appeal to different personalities. But mostly because different solutions might solve a problem in a unique way that the competing solutions may not have considered - often in ways that can ported and thus benefit the competitors and wider community.

So I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss anything that's outside your field of expertise.

What you're talking about is a luxury I can't afford. That's what I mean when I talk about the price. There are plenty of far more important technologies that I would rather learn.

I can't afford to learn two technologies that do about the same thing, of which one is significantly less popular, might now have tools that other has and runs on a significantly less popular OS.

That's actually a fair point and one I completely sympathise with. But your original argument very much sounded like you were suggesting that people in general shouldn't bother with FreeBSD, jails, nor any other technologies which weren't dominant in their respective field. Which is why we disagreed.

You misinterpreted it.

Or they can move to a steam engine which are much more stable, secure, and tested than cars consuming gasoline.

Embrace the change, it's for a better future.

> Embrace the change, it's for a better future.

Unfortunately, especially when you also factor in the impact of ZFS and DTrace, you are moving into the past, not the future.

Quite.

Embrace the change of having less security, less control, and less capability to debug your software.

Poster of embrace the community.

They don't have to embrace the change they have other options. What bothers me is they chose to shoot down everything and anything that has systemd in it out in the public. Just leave the fight and just embrace your choice and allow others to have their choice and don't pee on their parade.

Exactly that is your choice. I am concerned about the drama of systemd by people that don't like systemd always peeing on every and anything that mentions systemd.

It is in the old rpm vs deb, vim vs emacs, python vs perl dram of the past.

No, it isn't. Nobody is going to try to nuke my emacs install, and install vi on my machine instead. If vi started deleting emacs, or using non-utf8 encodings on all text for some reason, or otherwise made using emacs impossible, the vi developers would fix it, or the community would say, "What the FUCK!?" and probably fork it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com