Ask HN: Is anyone interested in the idea of “DevOps without containers”? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is anyone interested in the idea of “DevOps without containers”?

4 pointsandrewstuart13 comments

Is there anyone else who would be interested in exploring the idea of DevOps without using containers?

Isn't that.. what we were all doing all the time before four years ago?

I was thinking more about virtual machines instead of containers.

That's also what we were doing four years ago -- see the Vagrant project.

Interesting. So "why not Vagrant?"

I love Vagrant for dev environments, but I'm not a huge fan of using it in prod. I think it's just another layer of abstraction on top of the actual metal.

In general though, I'm with you. I fell out of love with Docker a couple of years ago and I've been a huge fan of vms since.

>> I fell out of love with Docker a couple of years ago

Why?

This is purely my experience and it is based on observations that are nearly two years old. Your mileage may vary. And since I've heard that Docker is much more stable, I plan on giving Docker another try (though on a side project) within the next six months.

That aside, the shortest possible answer is that Docker added significant amounts of complexity, without providing enough utility to make that additional cost worth it. As an example, at the time (I believe this has been fixed), you had to make sure that every machine that would work with Docker containers was on the exact same version of Docker. There was also significant overhead associated with making sure that the code inside of running containers was actually running. Finally, we found that some of the services we ran just simply didn't work well with Docker, so our deployments quickly became a mess of "this is Docker" and "this is raw."

Getting into Kubernetes certainly made Docker a more smooth experience, but that opened up another side. For me, the further I went down the Docker/Kubernetes path, the more I realized that I was implementing my own PAAS...at several times the cost of just using someone's PAAS!

I can echo a lot of these points.

Out of curiosity--what have you fallen back to as a PaaS? What do you do now?

Also, do you recall what couldn't be dockerized and had to be ran on bare-metal or VM? Performance-sensitive stuff, Mac OSX?

There is absolutely nothing about devops as a concept that requires or even implies containers (or VMs).

And yeah, I wish more sources and resources out there acknowledged that.

Been using Chef script to setup servers happily for the past 3 years

We do DevOps without containers in my company for the past two years. As mentioned by others theres 0 requirement to use containers to do devops.

I'm interested in DevOps without operating systems or containers. Anyone else?

Isn't that serverless?

What's your angle: IDE, testing, orchestration, monitoring, billing?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com