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Comment by movedx | Hacker News Reader

You couldn't be further from the truth, though.

What you're saying here is: someone new to this simply uses Docker and everything just works and is fine. The support is heavily reduced (for you, not the user) and so everything is good.

And that mentality is why we have crazy botnets doing terabytes per-second attacks these days -- your users just firing up a VM, using "docker compose up", and walking away because "it just works". The reality is, that system falls out of date pretty quickly, and exploit is found and patched, but that patch never sees the light of day for that user.

It's awesome you can get a user up and running so quickly, but the sheer amount of work required to actually maintain a server is too much for the average EVE Online player trying to run some ESI tool

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How do people learn then?

Personally I learn best by doing. If I study before I try something the results are poorer compared to the reverse. Make an attempt. Fail. Understand. Then study.

It's not an either or proposition, either.

Dockerfiles freshness is up to the maintainer, like any FOSS.

We do not have botnets because we share information about how to run servers. People run botnets and we have botnets because of mostly economic or political incentives-- the same reasons people do a lot of things.

You are not wrong about the complexity of something like running an EVE online server being beyond the abilities of the non-professional, but that should not preclude the information from being shared.

Script kiddies have been around for a long time. Borrowing the work of the better engineers and adapting it for their less idealistic goals.

You don’t learn in production. We’re talking about running production workloads here, not a localised lab. You can learn just fine locally with or without docker and other tooling that “eases” deployment of software. But when it comes to production it’s best to have a solid idea of what you’re doing and what a real production system requires.

Sadly, when people learn locally with “docker compose up” that becomes their baseline, their reality, and they believe everything else is taken of for them. Actually, you’re still running a process that’s bound to a network port (but with extra steps, because you used a container), and the entire ecosystem around that still needs to be secured.

That’s what’s been lost as of late :-(

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