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Comment by bogota | Hacker News Reader

I agree with everything in that post the problem i have when i even try to get someone to use alpine which is still a full OS just small is that no one cares. Developers don’t care that they have a 3GB image. They don’t want to learn about any of it. Ever time a developer has an issue with docker it comes right to the infra team like we own the image that they completely wrote and now is broken because they pinned it to latest.

We are in the nodejs world now where speed is all that matters. No one wants to understand what is going on under the hood. And no one takes the time to learn something new when your job only cares about the next feature. At the end of the day all that matters is money.

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This is how everyone works everywhere. The accountant doesn’t want to learn how windows services work, they just want to do their work. The c level obviously doesn’t care how anything works, they just want their data. Expecting people to care about things outside of their domain is a losing battle. Better to focus on taking the part that isnt their domain out of their hands so better choices can be made.

> doesn’t want to learn how windows services work, they just want to do their work

Is that actually true or is the company just so focused on short term metrics that it actively discourages this behavior?

Run a security scanner against that 3 GB image and tell the devs they have 1,000 CVEs to fix before they can deploy.

That’s a great way to convince the business to just ignore everything the security team says.

Or to implement optimized container images built with best security pratices. That’s the point of his argument btw.

Yes, I get that. My point is that you won’t accomplish that by holding the business hostage.

> Developers don’t care that they have a 3GB image. They don’t want to learn about any of it.

In a way it's not their fault. Management never allocates time for such things. It isn't in OKRs / KPIs. No 1 cares because they're not made to care. I've seen developers that tried and get "punished" for it so stop caring.

I've seen people spend their own time to make everyone's life happy e.g. CI/CD build times. End result is management complaining why they don't work on the "priority" i.e. requested features.

> No one wants to understand what is going on under the hood.

That's always been the case because "business" took over. This notion of "tech debt" is 1 of the worst offenders in that to non-technical people debt is something that can be left forever (as long as you pay interest) i.e. they'll never care.

But then developers need to learn to play that game. What is the business/financial reason to create small images? Can you come up with a KPI that makes it clear to the whole business that creating smaller images is important? (e.g. infra costs).

If not, than really why should anyone care about image size? If it does not have a meaningful impact on company results, it’s really a form of self-gratification isn’t it?

The whole docker/container craze was supposed to fix "works for me".

Yes, and no.

Docker images can still have a drift in layer delta if one would not pin system package versioning of the applications being installed, even if the instructions to generate those layers remain the same.

The output being an image does not make all iterations of those instructions the same thing.

You almost have to get to people before they learn bad habits. When I started creating containers for my company’s projects, I started with alpine and managed to sneak it in as the standard for everything. The developers didn’t care how it worked and it wasn’t hard to get our systems critter on board with the plan to keep images small. Requiring a justification for a non-alpine image helps keep people honest.

Agree, often nobody really notices the underlying issues until something breaks in production. It's a tough balance to strike between moving fast and being thorough

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