Docker Considered Harmful (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Docker Considered Harmful (2021)

catern.com

32 pointstodsacerdoti12 comments

I have a growing disdain for "_ considered harmful" articles. I swear I see at least one every month, and it's extremely cliche and pretentious.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744916

you should make a "considered harmeful articles considered harmful" to put an end to the madness with the perfect coup de grace

Already done: https://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html

The first one I read was "csh considered harmful" and I stuck to sh type shells

Looks like the first one was "goto considered harmful"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful

that said, I strongly disagree with docker being harmful.

In fact, I think it is an elegant solution to a number of problems and I use it frequently to my benefit.

And I love Dockerfiles

The alternative seems to be being a very pedantic bare metal sysadmin.

Does anyone here have any experience with having an entire org of (hundreds of) devs use these lower level features rather than Docker et al? In a k8s-centric organization, is this feasible at all?

Who is going to bother? Classic worse-is-better software has taken over. I don’t hate it and having the big cloud providers embrace it makes my life a lot easier than rolling my own janky version.

There has to be hundreds of articles written by somebody who just discovered the underpinnings of docker and feels compelled to share their fresh insight on a very boring topic. We know you can write a bash script and just discovered chroot.

What they don’t understand is the work that went into setting up the whole ecosystem.

Yeah. I had the beginning of some thought about C vs assembly, but that is already well discussed. This seems like another iteration of that topic to me. It has inspired me to try to replicate a Dockerfile using bash and these "lower level constructs" at some point.

The article may have been more convincing if it contained examples of Dockerfiles and an equivalent shell script. There were some links that I think went into this, but they looked pretty verbose so I didn't look into them tonight.

It's always fun to learn about esoteric linux tidbits. With that said, Docker offers a number of helpful abstractions and has an incredible ecosystem. I wonder if the author's views have changed since publishing?

or treat vm's as containers and just spawn a single process in a firecracker vm. More secure than containers will ever be and just as easy as another vm. Could be managed by kubernetes if you like or need to manage many of these.

We need containers because we've given up on OS-level isolation.

We need VMs because we've given up on container isolation.

...

(probably should have said "process isolation"; arguably containers are just more powerful process isolation)

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