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Comment by ergo14 | Hacker News Reader

How is debian nowdays for setting up things like containers? I've tried lxc in the past few years ago and got it working but it was not a pleasant experience, templates were broken.

I would love them to gain back more server marketshare.

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If there's anything that's not covered under:

https://wiki.debian.org/LXC

I'm sure the maintainers would love to hear from you.

I use for nearly all my docker containers the distro Alpine Linux.

It is much lighter. I commonly find that Alpine images use at least 300MB less disk than Debian ones.

I think he was asking about debian as a host

For containers I'd suggest using Debian slim.

Interesting, I didn't know about Debian slim.

For comparison, I just found this blog post [1], claiming the following:

> According to the docker images command, the debian:jessie-slim container clocks in at 88MB, compared to the full-fat debian:jessie container at 123MB. For reference, the ubuntu:xenial and centos:7 base containers are 130MB and 193MB respectively, where as the alpine base container is only 4MB, as mentioned in my post about the alpine base container.

[1] https://elegantinfrastructure.com/containers/cotw-debian-jes...

This is always a dilemma for me... Alpine allows for really small packages, but I never got used to its packaging tools (and I don't feel confident writing Dockerfiles with it). A matter of practice I guess. Besides, Docker caches layers so if you're using some common base layer (like Ubuntu or Debian) it's probably already on the machine. So I usually write Dockerfiles as `FROM debian` and then later adapt them to Alpine if they're meant to be distributed.

Yes, I did like you before. But once I got used to Alpine, apk (its package manager), and ash (its shell), I feel myself at home. Furthermore, in most occasions I find newer updated software on Alpine vs. Debian.

Also besides disk space, I really have no idea how docker manages memory, but my assumption (naive?) is that smaller images will consume less RAM memory. I didn’t benchmark this though.

Sorry for late reply. Depends on what is in the package. Docker is just a thin separation of processes, so the situation is very similar to size of packages on host Linux OS. What matters is the size of binaries and loaded data, which I guess is not that different between distributions.

Docker-ce from upstream docker works well on Debian.

I've not looked at "naked" lxc for quite some time - but I've used Lxd on Ubuntu a bit, and that's a great experience.

If what you want is "containers" (single-purpose, ephemeral) - I'd say for now the docker tooling is best. But there's not much isolation - there lxc is better.

I've yet to try alternative "run times" like rkt - but I believe that's the better way forward compared to docker. For now we use docker mostly for packing up an application and managing dependencies - not for resource/security isolation.

I suggest reading over :

https://coreos.com/rkt/docs/latest/rkt-vs-other-projects.htm...

Have you tried this?

https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/getting-started-cli/

If you are an lxd fan you probably want to move to Ubuntu or maybe even Ubuntu core.

I'm a docker fan myself but Debian is all I use and it works just fine.

One LXD has been ported, it should become easier. However I am afraid it might still take quite some time. https://wiki.debian.org/LXD

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