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Comment by hacknat | Hacker News Reader

There’s no need for them to live on. There are open source alternatives that mimic Docker exactly. In fact on Fedora[1] the “docker” cli command is actually buildah and podman (you actually can’t install Docker on Fedora anymore - I genuinely haven’t noticed a difference). The commands are exactly the same right down to the command starting with the word “docker”.

I don’t wish them ill, but literally everything has been replicated. If they fail as a company it won’t matter to developers who don’t use their enterprise software.

I actually think the company isn’t long for this world. It wouldn’t surprise me if they got bought for a paltry sum in the next few years.

Their lasting legacy is that most software and people assume that a shortened container image points to docker.io.

1 https://fedoramagazine.org/docker-and-fedora-32/

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Red Hat removed docker prematurely, Podman is not ready to replace docker for all production cases yet.

We have had to replace RHEL systems with Ubuntu to keep some of our applications running as they fail on Podman. A major problem is also that podman-compose is far from feature parity with docker-compose.

> We have had to replace RHEL systems with Ubuntu to keep some of our applications running as they fail on Podman.

I replaced Centos8 with Amazon Linux 2 ("amazon linux extras" provides a working docker installation) for exactly the same reason. I like the idea of podman and buildah and I wish them well, but for the time being I can't afford to debug the missing pieces and subtle failures.

True but I would use pod yaml with podman. It’s not anywhere near being on par with Docker-compose but it’s the better tool because every pod can be used rootless.

I'm aware of podman, which is more or less a drop-in replacement for Docker, but is there anything comparable to Docker Compose and Docker Swarm?

I use Docker Swarm (technically "Swarm Mode") in production, and I'm really happy with it - it's so easy to configure and operate, but I am worried that it will no longer be maintained at some point.

You're not wrong to worry (scroll down to "What about Docker Swarm?")

https://www.mirantis.com/blog/mirantis-acquires-docker-enter...

I use Swarm at home and for my projects because the cognitive and resource overhead is so low. It just works and it's easy to set up.

buildah/podman/skopeo are nice tech. and all, but they don't exactly mimic the setup of Docker for Windows/Mac.

If for no other reason that, they don't do Windows containers :) I know of quite a few corps using Windows containers in prod. now, take up may have been slow, but it's happening.

Also Docker for Windows/Mac have an easier install/setup process than manually setting up VMs and installing tools on them.

> There’s no need for them to live on.

Maybe not, but considering how much they gave, I think we should want them to live on, and do what we can to help them. Do we really want to live in a world where a startup company makes as big an impact on the way we develop and deploy software as Docker did, only to have all possible business taken from it by bigger players?

I understand this sentiment, but a lot of the original team and the certainly the original founder aren’t even there anymore. Not to mention that a lot of Docker’s business missteps have been self inflicted wounds.

There have been lots of great technologies that haven’t directly made their creators rich, but their good legacy usually/eventually catches up with them.

> but their good legacy usually/eventually catches up with them.

I think that's the just-world fallacy. [1] It's up to us to reward good work. So I guess I should go get a paid Docker Hub account.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

So I agree with you about supporting good technology which you want to see survive.

I don't think the poster you're replying to was invoking a just world fallacy, however. I read it as saying that developers who build solid systems that people like tend to thrive, even if their business fails.

That appears to be true, and not because of karma, because top-tier developers are in very high demand. Demonstrating that you're one of those isn't the same thing as running a successful business.

Podman is 1:1 compatible for running hello world. Your mileage in real projects will vary.

podman in podman doesn't seem to work. that's a showstopper for a lot of work.

I had had some pretty positive experience with docker-in-docker running in podman for ci/cd until podman v2 was released. Then I started getting a lot of weird crashes and segfaults and ditched podman.

Yes, you read it correctly, running privileged docker-in-docker containers with podman to spawn docker containers in dind containers. The good thing is that networking was handled flawlessly. And there were no conflicts between docker and podman

podman claims to be a drop-in replacement for Docker, yet when I tried to treat it as one, I ran into bugs and a lack of feature parity.

Had the same experience and the compose equivalent was barely functional.

Yep, same. We have had to replace RHEL with Ubuntu for container workloads to keep things working.

Docker Desktop is the only non-hacky way to get a decent Docker (and k8s) setup for development purposes on macOS and Windows. Linux on the desktop never needed that, but those other two do.

Have you tried WSL2? It's been a dream for my use cases as a web developer.

> you actually can’t install Docker on Fedora anymore

Moby is docker effectively. Your link describes how to install docker on Fedora.

Podman is not mature yet and it has many bugs. I am currently using it for a project, and lately I am starting to doubt it is prod ready. But it has some security options not available with docker. So Docker is still my first option.

Are you absolutely certain? I had to hack around a bit but I got it running just fine: https://ibb.co/X7dpt7g

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