Comment by serf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by serf | Hacker News Reader

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the OS will have an understood abstraction behind the filesystem structure, whereas container-systems often create an entirely new abstraction that they view as the best way.

this makes sense when you're trying to be deployable universally, but it increases the amount of onboarding that someone needs to receive before they're proficient with the container system; onboarding they may have not actually needed to get the software working and well understood, simply 'docker overhead'.

from personal experience : i'm a long time old linux person, the insistence on going 'all in' on Docker (or whatever) just to run a python script that has two or three common shared dependencies gains me nothing but the hassle of now having to maintain and understand a container system.

if you're shipping truly fragile software that is dependent on version 1.29382828 rather than version 1.29382827 then I understand the benefits gained, but just to containerize something very simple in order to follow industry trends is obnoxious, increasingly common, and seemingly has soured a lot of people on a good idea.

p.s. : I can also understand the idea of containerizing very simple things as parts of a larger mechanism; I just don't get it with the promise that it'll reduce end-user complexity, it isn't that simple.

I like your point of view. I started working with software more than 20 years ago and did my fair share of VMs, bare metal, ESXi 3.5, and so on.

However, we live in the world where the choice we have for new hires is: a) teach them all of those OS fundamentals, b) give them Docker.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to teach said new developers all those underlying concepts, but when we talk about training juniors and have them contribute relatively quickly, it’s a much smaller surface area to bite through.

Docker doesn't solve having to know OS fundamentals as both the inside and the outside of the container have an OS, and now you additionally have to know how to communicate between the former and the latter.

> This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to teach said new developers all those underlying concepts

That's what I said.

Furthermore, let's be pragmatic. The operations team needs to know, yes. We want new hires to contribute and feel productive. They'll naturally learn while working on software. A junior person can contribute almost immediately with a limited surface knowledge.

Less friction: no need to understand systemd/upstart/rc what have you, /etc, /opt, /usr, mount, umount, differences between various distros, build-essentials, Development Tools, apt, dpkg, rpm, dnf, ssh keys, ...

The right time will come but give them an easy way in. Containers provide exactly that.

All they need to know: it's somewhat isolated so under normal circumstances whatever you do in the container doesn't affect the host, how to expose ports, basics of getting your dependencies in, volumes, basic understanding of container networks - for things to talk to each other they need to be in the same network. Enough to start.

Database in container solves a few problems for me:

1. I can start it and stop it automatically with Compose. That's a big increase in ergonomics.

2. I don't have to write my own scripts to set up and tear down the database in the dev environment. The Postgres image + Compose does all that for me.

3. Contributors who don't know much about Unix or database admin stuff (data analysts learning Python & data scientists contributing to the code) don't have to install or mess with anything. It works on everyone's machine the same way.

Volume and port mapping are basically trivial concepts anyway. There's been zero downside for me in using it, even though I personally have the skills and knowledge to not "need" it. Why would I go without it? It saves me time and effort that could be significantly better used elsewhere.

I am honestly shocked by the amount of comments here that mention volume mounts as some gotcha. No it isn't. It is as trivial as it gets.

About "truly fragile software", it seems to be the norm now, thanks to the ease docker provides to hide this

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