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Comment by evol262 | Hacker News Reader

My primary contention with your post is that docker doesn't provide a package-manager-like way of ifnding out whether or not you're running older images. Everyone has their own homegrown way of doing it.

1. Don't use old shit 2. Docker should provide a way to tell you you're not running the latest tagged image so you stop running old shit 3. Don't use base images whose maintainers can't be bothered to rebuild when security updates hit

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Well, all docker containers are hashed and can be version tagged. If you do a pull and run the 'latest' tag, it'll always be the HEAD of the commit hash.

This is assuming you want to trust some 3rd party with the maintenance and security of your production environment.

Docker containers are, usually, just operating systems running a single logical application service. I don't think Docker promises a free Sys Admin. ;)

My complaint is primarily that there's no mechanism to let you know "hey, there's an update to this" in the same way as apt, yum, and other systems do.

It's not about trusting a 3rd party with the maintenance and security of your production environment as much as it is "Docker should provide a way to let the people handling the maintenance of your production environment to know shit may be happening". Rebuilding from the 'latest' tag is great. If you know you have to rebuild, and that there's an update available.

Does AWS does this with their AMIs? Everything you listed can be applied in virtually the same way with VM images, and their are community based AMIs with all sorts of vulnerabilities and non-updated code, people just know not to use them or build their own.

Well, no. Everything I listed can be applied in virtually the same way to openstack images or AMIs or whatever... except that the intended use case of those includes regularly updating packages, which docker does not.

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