3 ms·
An interview question I asked recently: what are the advantages of Docker over an application deployed as a statically linked binary?
by gaius 9y ago
An interview question I asked recently: what are the advantages of Docker over an application deployed as a statically linked binary?
- dopamean 9y agoWhat kind of answers do you expect/would like to hear?
- gaius 9y agoI intend it to be a starting point for a conversation, someone who really understands it will be able to convince the skeptic that I play, someone who is just typing the commands because it's trendy won't. Also it helps if they know what a statically linked binary is.
- fapjacks 9y agoIt is obvious from your comments that nobody will convince you of any merit Docker has. You are not "playing a skeptic".
- gaius 9y agoI like containers as a concept, and I like the Docker commands for building them and running them locally. I am less convinced by Docker Swarm as a Prod-grade runtime environment, and skeptical that Docker the company can build a viable business out of something that will rapidly become a commodity, I expect the file format will long outlive the company that created it. But those are nothing to do with the question really, which can be answered purely technically.
- eatmyshorts 9y agoCurious--how do you feel about Mesosphere and Kubernetes vs. Docker Swarm?
- gaius 9y agoBig fan of DC/OS. Ambivalent about k8s, but maybe it's just not for my use cases.
- brianwawok 9y agoBased on most interviews, he wants you to answer like he would answer or he wouldn't hire you.
- gaius 9y agoDid you just assume my agenda?
- my_ghola 9y agoThe same benefit of deploying a statically linked binary in a VM without the overhead of the VM.
- meric 9y agoBinaries are built for specific operating systems. E.g. A Linux binary can't run on Mac OS X, except with a VM or... a container. :)
- mbrock 9y agoI use Docker as a tool for creating statically linked binaries... For example, here: https://github.com/mbrock/gf-static/blob/master/Dockerfile https://github.com/mbrock/gf-static/blob/master/Dockerfile Making static binaries is often extremely painful and confusing. It's easier on a distribution like Alpine, and nicely enough, Alpine comes as a Docker image. In general, Docker's ability to basically spin up a whole Linux distribution, with a whole root file system, makes it very different from just using static binaries. Along with Docker's image repository infrastructure, it makes some things easy that weren't easy before. Like, I don't know if there is a static binary build of the Erlang runtime system, and I don't know what kind of file system tree that system needs, but I just now opened an xterm and typed "docker run -it --rm erlang" and got an Erlang 9.0.2 shell.