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>> Containers are just a better tool for writing OS configuration scripts. (If your team is full of Chef experts then it's not "better" for your team, but for a

>> Containers are just a better tool for writing OS configuration scripts. (If your team is full of Chef experts then it's not "better" for your team, but for a lot of teams it is). No, not really. You could argue that dockerfiles are part image provisioning script and part process environment specification, but I think you'd still be missing the main advantage. Dependency isolation is the thing that usually gets touted, but that's only part of the picture. After all you can isolate dependencies now by baking images. That works great, it's well proven and reliable. But the vm that runs a single boot image can potentially run dozens of different containers, and using an orchestration platform you can easily and quickly shift those loads around, scale up and down, reconfigure and redeploy, all with far less overhead then deploying an image to a vm requires. Containers didn't become a popular tool because they don't add value. The use case for them has been clear for over four years now.

dozzie 9y ago
> Containers didn't become a popular tool because they don't add value. The use case for them has been clear for over four years now Well, yes, they did become popular despite not providing anything substantially new. The main value of containers is that programmer who works with network now doesn't need (initially) to understand how to configure the network, which is a dumb idea by itself. All the other things added by containers boil down to distributing a tarball with whole operating system, so you can run that in a chroot. From where I stand it seems that programmers didn't want to learn how to build, distribute, and configure software with OS packages, so they invented their own binary packages system.
- bananadonkey 9y ago
  The irony here being I had to port our production RPM (rhel-based) build system to Docker just so it could have a reasonable API and be anything close to maintainable. Edit: the extreme portability and "free" concurrency were just a bonus.

dozzie 9y ago

> Containers didn't become a popular tool because they don't add value. The use case for them has been clear for over four years now Well, yes, they did become popular despite not providing anything substantially new. The main value of containers is that programmer who works with network now doesn't need (initially) to understand how to configure the network, which is a dumb idea by itself. All the other things added by containers boil down to distributing a tarball with whole operating system, so you can run that in a chroot. From where I stand it seems that programmers didn't want to learn how to build, distribute, and configure software with OS packages, so they invented their own binary packages system.

bananadonkey 9y ago
The irony here being I had to port our production RPM (rhel-based) build system to Docker just so it could have a reasonable API and be anything close to maintainable. Edit: the extreme portability and "free" concurrency were just a bonus.