sleepycal

It's actually coming in about a week or two. I wanted to do it on 17th (exactly 1 year after) but needed more time to work on it. No spoilers, I don't want to the ruin the surprise :)

Nope, their role could be easily removed by technology. Internal hirers are required, recruiters are not

I'd like to hear more on this, have you raised the question on Reddit too?

Honestly, I've had to endure countless terrible recruiters/agencies, to the point that I don't even pick up the phone unless they have been referred by word of mouth - or if I really need the cash ;) And 9/10 times, they haven't even bothered to read your profile, it's just a blind mail shot

Interesting read. It's about time that recruiters are put in their place, the majority are lazy/untalented yet they take 20% cut. It's not right :X (Disclaimer: I'm biased).

Although this comment seems to be more focused on baiting, rather than constructive criticism, it points out that I have failed to justify my comments about Docker registry being overly complex, though I addressed this in another comment [1]. Either way, thanks for taking time to give your thoughts.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015752

Thank you for the honest feedback, this is the first post I've seen arguing the technical aspects of the article, thank you.

> The strike-out font was a nice touch, man

I've made it clear in other replies [1] that the comment was of poor taste, the strikethrough was intended to show that I was wrong to make the statement, but also not attempt to hide it from history. I have since moved it to the bottom of the article to draw attention away. To be absolutely clear, I admit I was wrong to make that comment.

You hold the opinion that most of the technical frustrations I mentioned are not deal breakers, for you these things don't matter, but to me they do. As I explained in other comments [2], my priorities are based on precision, perfection and beauty, not "getting the job done".

In my use case, Docker worked in production for 6 months and got the job done, but it left me feeling frustrated and dirty. As such, I'll refrain from responding to your individual technical arguments because we have a fundamentally different view on priorities and importance, and will result in both of us wasting our time.

However I've added a link to this reply in the article, as other users might find this rebuttal helpful. (If you would rather I remove your handle, let me know).

Thank you again for spending time writing this detailed reply.

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/2v4fqe/docker_is_f... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015816

Just wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who has taken time to reply, the response has been overwhelming! There's still many comments I'm yet to reply to, and will finish replying to these tomorrow evening, but it's now 5am and sleep is required.

Configuration manager, such as Puppet, Chef, Salt Stack etc.

Although I would agree that services such as EC2 are not cost effectively for 1:1, this argument is somewhat invalidated when you consider $5 instances from DockerOcean. $100/month for 20 concurrent VMs is enough to replicate even the most complex of deployments. But if you're running on a shoestring, in which case it's probably not production critical, then sure containerisation might be useful too.

Also remember that Docker is not a container deployment system, and afaik, they don't advertise themselves as such (though they also don't make much effort to explain this explicitly either)

I'm glad you replied, as it wasn't intended to be arrogant. Some people care about the end result, not worrying about how it gets done, as long as it's done. Others care about the journey, perfecting their art at every stage, with little consideration for the end goal. And some people are able to balance these things.

Have you ever looked at the source code of a dependant library, followed by an overpowering and compelling urge to write your own from scratch? Suppressing the urge to rage quit because your tools are fighting against you, not with you. For me, it is a constant daily fight to force myself not to do things "properly", for it's mostly an unrealistic and unachievable goal.

Believe me when I say that being a perfectionist is nothing to be arrogant about, and despite it being one of my major strengths in some ways, it's also one of my biggest flaws.

(I'm taking it on faith that you're not trolling, and have taken time to give an honest reply)

I'd be inclined to agree that my story was incomplete, something which I addressed in another comment [2], and I have made some amendments over the last few hours which give fair reference to the positives of the Docker ecosystem. However I would disagree that I have failed to provide sufficient backing for the argument being presented, and has also been addressed in another comment [2].

I'm sorry to hear the article gave you the impression of being trolled, as I certainly did not intend this. If there are specific areas which you feel I did not justify, rather than an overall dismissal of the argument being put forward, then please call me out on it. If you read my other comments, you will see I am a reasonable person and happy to admit when I'm wrong. Though despite these corrections, I'm standing strongly by my conclusion.

PS) I have recently grown a neck beard, but it's going soon, itching the crap out of me.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015952

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9016286

Heh, I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for the heads up, I'll digest properly tomorrow!

I would have to strongly disagree with this, not just because AWS has been capable of doing this for quite some time, but also because of my own success stories. I'm due to post a follow up article, explaining the pros/cons of the alternative solutions, within a month or so.

Thank you for your honest feedback, I do really appreciate it. You've raised the same point many others raised, and it's important to note that my argument of uselessness is from the specific standpoint of daily, long term usage of Docker, both locally and in production. I have since updated the article to reflect on some more of the positives, and you + others are right to call me out on this.

If you look further into the article, you will see that I do give fair mention that Docker/LXC can result in faster startup times and lower memory usage.

The tone of the article is an accurate representation of my feelings towards Docker, writing anything else would have been a lie. I'm sorry you feel like the article was a waste of time, but I appreciate your honesty! Despite these corrections, I still stand by my conclusion, however it's been quite insightful to have peer review from a wide audience and so far 99.9% of the feedback has been constructive.

Thanks for sharing, I've seen appc mentioned in a few comments, I'll check it out properly tomorrow. You also raise a good comment about blindly trusting containers which, despite having concerns about this in the past, regrettably I didn't touch on.

Thanks, my bad. SmartOS has been in my todo list for a while now, along with CoreOS, they both look very interesting.

Thank you for the feedback. Although the README looks slightly easier than previous, it still makes for difficult reading, and I'd argue that they need to document this better. Unless you have a link to somewhere this has already been done? (a quick 5 minute look on Google didn't give any definitive answer)

Thank you! I've heard good things about Core OS, looking forward to trying it in the lab.

Although I haven't yet reviewed LXD, I agree that plain LXC is an absolute pita to use, at least it was in 2012 (the last time I used it in prod, aside from Docker)

Interesting, I hadn't heard of HTCondor before but have recently become more interested in bioinformatics, which seems to use this quite a bit (at least in Cambridge). I'll have a read, thanks for the heads up :)

Thank you for your honest thoughts, I respect that. I've updated the article to reflect the comments that yourself and many others have made, and you're right to call me out on it.

You are right that I've failed to justify my testing, other than stating that it was used in prod for 6 months, and in hindsight this was a mistake. I'll amend the article to reflect this, naturally it will be of limited use without reproducible code snippets, but it will at least complete the story.

As for polishing, I'd spent around 18 hours writing this article, with 4 full cleanups. I had considered putting a job out on fiverr to perfect the grammar, but that felt wrong.

Thank you for the feedback, that's actually quite an interesting use case of the Docker ecosystem. I've already updated the article to reflect this, as you raise the same point that many others made.

(copy) "However it's important to note that this article focuses on the daily, long term usage of Docker, both locally and in production"

Vagrant certainly has it's own problems and frustrating bugs, in fact I outright refused to use it in the early days. There is differing opinion on "the right way", depending on what your priorities are. Mine are based on precision, perfection and beauty.

I'll check out MirageOS, I've also heard some interesting things around CoreOS, which I'm hoping to get some lab time for soon. Finding time to review everything properly is difficult, this article was the summary of 6 months work and 18 hours writing.

Thank you for your honesty. Although I stand by my comments of Docker being unnecessary, I would agree that my "If you expect anything positive" comment is wrong. This has been pointed out by other people as well, and I'm going to be amending the article shortly to reflect this.

> Also these VM images usually contain tons of undocumented "state"

Although I agree this approach is absolutely flawed, and anyone doing so needs to re-evaluate their workflow, I feel this comment is more an argument of doing things properly, rather than a positive of Docker. Everything you mentioned above can be easily achieved by using Vagrant and a provisioner. But as discussed in other comments, the Docker ecosystem helps you get started quicker.

Thank you for the detailed feedback and links, much appreciated. Your comments regarding performance are absolutely correct and I'll update the article to reflect this. LX branded zones, and indeed Solaris in general, is something I haven't looked into so I'll certainly watch that video/deck tomorrow. Thanks again

Thanks for your honesty, I'm drafting a follow up article which explains the pros/cons of each alternative that I've reviewed so far (packer.io, heroku and ec2). However people have been posting some interesting alternatives which I didn't know about, so it'll be a month or so.

An excellent question, and I'm drafting a follow-up article which answers this, due to be published in the next month or so.