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Comment by mcbutterbunz | Hacker News Reader

We've had great success with Docker and Kubernetes for our stateless apps.

As a developer, one thing I absolutely love is being able to run an image without having to install anything (other than Docker). If I want to play around with something new, its easy to get started and easy to clean up.

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Hosting stateless apps is simple. If the underlying host fails? don't worry, just spin up a few new copies. Slap a load balancer infront and we can do a/b or blue green.

Smashing.

But where is that state held? maybe your lucky and your data can be hosted in a single RDS instance. Maybe your partition scheme is simple.

However, managing distributed state is hard_.

Playing with something new should be as simple as unpacking a tarball and rm -rfing the directory when done. This should be possible in the comfort of my home directory and uid. If I need a whole separate copy of a computer's files just to try out something, then something very very fundamental is broken.

How do you install dependencies in this model? As far as can tell, you end up in situations like this

https://askubuntu.com/questions/193695/installing-packages-i...

  Playing with something new should be as simple as unpacking a tarball and rm -rfing the directory when done.

Needing a single install script before, and uninstall script after is acceptable.

Yes I agree things are fundamentally broken with these situations, and they're at the common OS design level.

What it that something depends on a different operating system and libraries that conflict with yours?

Also the world you describe as should is not the world we live in. I should be able to exist in the world without danger or undue prosection.

Docker containers primarily mean Linux userland. It doesn’t help you with different operating systems.

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