Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhinoceraptor | Hacker News Reader

I think by 'production', they mean 'ready for general use on developer laptops'. No one in their right mind is deploying actual production software on Docker, on OS X/Windows.

I've been using it on my laptop daily for a month or two now, and it's been great. Certainly much better than the old Virtualbox setup.

View on HN

>No one in their right mind is deploying actual production software on Docker, on OS X/Windows.

Since the whole point of Docker would be to deploy these in production and not just for development, I don't see how the term 'ready for production' can be used. Isn't this just a beta?

I doubt the problems mentioned happen on Linux or CoreOS, which is likely what a production environment will run on.

> Linux or CoreOS

Well, now I'm confused

Sorry, CoreOS is Linux as well, but in my mind it's enough of a hyper-specialised immutable auto-updatable container-specific version of Linux that it warrants a separate category when talking about Docker.

Docker for Windows is to isolate Windows software.

It's not a tool to test Linux containers on Windows.

The deployment target for Docker containers for Windows will be a Windows OS.

Sadly, no, they're using the name "Docker for Windows" to refer to the Docker-on-Linux-in-a-VM-on-Windows version.

Real native Windows containers and a Docker shim to manage them are coming: [1] but not released yet.

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowsconta...

I don't think so. That's what Jeffery Snover is working on in Server 2016 with Windows nano server.

Unless something has changed since the last time I checked, The WindowsServerCore docker image was not generally available yet and requires server2016 (I think it was TP6 the last time I checked)

Docker, to my knowledge, is still exclusively Linux flavors. (Though I'm happy to be corrected if someone knows more than me)

Docker images still aren't generally available, but you can now run Windows Container Images based on the NanoServer docker image (and WindowsServerCore image if you replace nanoserver with windowsservercore in their image URL in the docs below) on Windows 10 (insiders build)[0].

[0]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowsconta...

I went wide-eyed about three or four times while reading those instructions!

Super exciting! Thanks for the comment.

I am almost positive that is completely incorrect. Can you give any example of Docker being used to isolate Windows software?

You're right. I was wrong about this

you would use kubernetes, dc/os, swarm mode for aws, etc for that. Containers are portable.. nobody is launching a windows vm and doing a "docker run" for their production env

The fact that I can have Bash up and running in any distro I feel like within minutes blows my friggin mind. Docker is the stuff of the future. We were considering moving our development environment to Docker for some Fun, but we're still holding off until it is more stable and speedy.

I'm still using VirtualBox. Could you elaborate why Docker is better?

Leaving containers vs VMs aside, docker for Mac leverages a custom hypervisor rather than VirtualBox. My overall experience with it is that it is more performant (generally), plays better with the system clock and power management, and is otherwise less cumbersome than VirtualBox. They are just getting started, but getting rid of VirtualBox is the big winner for me.

It's based on the OS X sandbox and xhyve which is in turn is based on bhyve https://blog.docker.com/2016/03/docker-for-mac-windows-beta/

Thanks!

When I used VirtualBox for Docker (using Docker machine/toolbox), I would run out of VM space, have to start and stop the VM, and it was just clunky all around.

Docker.app has a very nice tray menu, I don't know or care anything about the VM it's running on, and generally is just better integrated to OS X. For instance, when I run a container, the port mapping will be on localhost rather than on some internal IP that I would always forget.

I don't think he was comparing Docker to VirtualBox.

In Docker 1.11 they used VirtualBox to host a Linux Docker Image to run containers. In 1.12 they switched to Microsoft's Hyper-V.

On the other hand I find my old setup with VMware much more reliable and performant. And I can continue to use the great tools to manage the VM instead of being limited to what docker provides. Some advanced network configuration is simply impossible in docker's VM.

I'm pretty sure they don't mean that, or they would have said that it was still in Beta.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com