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Comment by JimmaDaRustla | Hacker News Reader

I don't use Docker, although I don't have a need for it.

As a solo coder, I love vagrant - the whole nature that you can use a configuration file with a script or two to build out an entire VM has so many benefits. Less time to build the VM, easily destroy the entire VM, easily rebuild the entire VM, save drive space by destroying the VM when you don't need it, keep the VM configuration in a git repo, distribute the configuration to someone else to use, and the best is having all the steps used to configure the VM are documented in the config file and scripts.

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Everything you said can be done with Docker, just faster.

If he's not on a Linux host that can run Docker to start with, its not going to be faster, and its adding complexity.

I was able to get a somewhat serviceable environment up on my Mac. However: after all the effort involved I ended up sticking with vagrant. There is no way I could explain the process to someone I would potentially work with.

I check back in about once every two months to see if there have been any breakthroughs.

I have typically created a Vagrantfile to spin up an Ubuntu host with a static IP, configure its' docker to listen on a network port, and 'brew install docker' to get the client on Mac. Set DOCKER_HOST to the vagrant VM IP+docker port, and it's easy to distribute to a team.

I wish the Docker team hadn't more or less given up with boot2docker, since it completely abandons the vagrant advantage of a folder shared with the OS. People do wierd shit like trying to mount their OSX home dir over NFS and, well, Vagrant solved this a long time ago.

How good Docker is really to isolate the environment from the host machine? With a VM we have a complete isolation, while Docker (i.e. containers) share resources with the host machine; what about having different tools and especially different versions being installed on the two?

Docker gives you this level of isolation. Basically the Kernel is shared in Docker, but not a whole heck of a lot more. Docker is very good at giving you what appears to be a completely isolated system.

It isn't a VM though, and there are some isolation issues, but primarily as a target for security, not something that results in different versions or tools being a issue.

So what would be the advantage of using Docker for deployment, as opposed to simply fire up a whole server based on a Vagrant image?

Much better resource utilization, much better control of the deployment environment, much easier packaging/release constructs.

Is "just use docker" the new universal HN comment like "can somebody port this to javascript" or "blockchain solves all the world's problems because {mumble, mumble, unfounded optimistic ideology, mumble}"

VMs are great when you want to test cross-platform or cross-architecture or legacy compatibility all on one machine (there's more to the world than Ubuntu).

Not really. Docker is a fundamentally different approach to software execution and packing, which really has a number of significant effects into how we deploy and run software. Basically, it allows deployed systems to be packaged as a very complete redistributable artifact, including not only dependency managing, packaging and distribution, but also resource isolation, scaling, and security. It's far more universal then puppet or vagrant, far easier then ansible, and far more efficient then a VM, and far more robust then any of the previous linux container efforts.

While right now, it's a linux only thing, with the incoming support of Windows, things will start to change dramatically.

That's quite a bit of koolaid someone has been drinking.

Interesting. I haven't looked into it much because I like the concept of having a completely separate system virtualized for the sake of being as similar to the production environment as possible (Ubuntu), and I typically have been coding on Arch.

If what you say is true, Docker would be a great way to do development through SSH on a VPS with minimal RAM and resources. I'll definitely take a look at it.

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