Hacker News Reader

Comment by Rapzid | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu is container linux for me. I WANT to install stuff on my host; thank you apt. CoreOS produced etcd which is outliving the OS distribution.. Fleet was a thing.. Their update system.. This pivot away from the distro makes sense.

View on HN

CoreOS is still very much a thing. The update system is seamless and has never once caused a hiccup for me. And I certainly don't perceive this as a pivot away from the distro, at all. Not sure where any of your statements come from. Except the Fleet bit, maybe, but that's just because they saw something better in Kubernetes and now contribute heavily to it.

And I'm curious what you want to install on your host if you're using containers. Surely you're not logging into these VMs interactively?

(A bit funny too, Ubuntu's fork of docker in Xenial was causing a reboot of basically everything under systemd (including ssh) under certain conditions used in Kubernetes.)

Where is the statement that they are moving away from fleet? There was no mention of anything related to that in the linked article.

Sorry, I didn't mean that. My perception is that I see far less announcements about Fleet, but I don't know any official stance or anything. Didn't expect it to have as much activity as it does on GitHub, but the most frequent recent committer doesn't seem to be an employee (again, that doesn't necessarily mean anything). I was mostly agreeing that I don't see Fleet as a super popular tool these days (contrary to features they've contributed to Kubernetes or the ecosystem, etcd, coreos, flannel, etc)

This is roughly correct. The README says it best: https://github.com/coreos/fleet#current-status

Also, as you mention there are very compelling reasons that when Kubernetes came on the scene 2 years ago we started contributing heavily instead of trying to compete. We started to say something with fleet and Kubernetes completed our sentence: https://github.com/coreos/fleet/blob/master/Documentation/fl...

Overall, we recommend everyone use Kubernetes as the way to orchestrate containers.

Personally I feel it's a shame - Kubernetes is way overkill for most of the deployments I do. At the same time fleet has a number of annoying problems even on (or even particularly on) small clusters.

I see Kubernetes deployments where more of the containers running are there to provide infrastructure than actual workloads, which gets just silly. For small deployments like that, something as simpl as Fleet but with a better scheduling story would be preferable to me.

But I get that those kind of deployments won't pay the bills as they're certainly much less likely to pay for CoreOS services.

But Kubernetes is the future [0].

[0] https://circleci.com/blog/its-the-future/

Indeed if you have just a handful of hosts, spending gigas of ram for kubernetes is not really exciting.

Fleet is great for some things - I love being able to use it to distribute systemd units. But it has a bunch of problems (doesn't scale well to really large systems, balances poorly without "help" in the case of hosts that fail and recover, has a tendency to restart things unnecessarily if it loses connection to etcd or heartbeats fail, which can happen way too easily) and CoreOS have been pretty clear they're not prioritising fixing them.

For my part I still use it for smaller clusters - it's far easier to deploy than Kubernetes, for starters - and I might very well continue using it in parallel with Kubernetes for deploying systemd units as well, but it's important to be aware of its shortcomings.

I didn't see a statement, but their inclusion of the kubelet last year, and their ongoing involvement with Kubernetes is indicative that if fleet remains, it will be as a niche bootstrapping tool for higher order cluster management.

Poor choice of words. I don't mean outliving in the sense that CoreOS is dead, I mean it's living a much bigger life than the distro.

> Ubuntu is container linux for me.

What?!?! I'd put OpenVZ'd RHEL a country mile ahead of Ubuntu, and there are better candidates than that (like CoreOS). What's the idea behind Ubuntu's claim to the brand?

> I WANT to install stuff on my host

I'm sure you do, but that means you don't want "container linux". It means you want Linux with containers.

Maybe he wants his container to be as close as possible to his development machine?

Actually he just wants to install things on the host, which flys in the face of containerise all the things.

YMMV but I think coreos has a good base to support the latter.

Easiest way to accomplish that is to run your dev inside containers... Then it's exactly the same. ;-)

I suspect many already do that. From experience, it's still easier to develop on and deploy to the same container host OS. Ie: Docker on Ubuntu for both is best. You'd be hard pressed to do development on CoreOS/Container Linux.

Why would that matter? A container is a container

Reply on news.ycombinator.com