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Comment by zorked | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but think what a failure of the Linux user land this is - we're essentially saying the only thing we can count on being there is the kernel?

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Despite the plethora of Docker articles here on HN, I haven't paid much attention to containers. Reading this article, I get the impression that they occupy a niche somewhere between a chroot jail and a VM.

The question is, how to deploy an application in this kind of environment? Maybe I build a minimal container and find that a DBMS works fine until it does something like dlopen("/usr/lib/libxml2.so"). Oops, rebuild the container with another library and try again.

After fixing one of the broken links in the blog post, I found this article, which describes an Oracle container:

http://rhelblog.redhat.com/2014/10/29/containerizing-databas...

Yeah, it's called testing. But it's no different from, say, building a server and finding that the DBMS works fine until it doesn't. The only difference is that when you fix it, you can be sure(er) that you've actually fixed it, compared to a classic server, where there is a lot of state that can obscure the real problem.

Thank you, we will fix the link.

I agree. A couple of days ago there was a mention about Wirth's law [1], which reminded me how far we went with containers.

I'm using vagrant for development and sometimes I run 2-3 containers with the same project.

My MacBook has 16 GB RAM, 2.8 i7 CPU, but no wonder I have troubles with the CPU going to the top.

I'm not sure how far containers will be popularised, but indeed it will definitely have some performance drawbacks.

[1] : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

GNU/Linux is no better than other UNIX alternatives, it basically has the same bag of problems as during the UNIX wars.

There is no such thing as a linux user land. So no, the only thing you can count on is the kernel.

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