> There are people who with a straight face claim configuration management is unnecessary if you have a single shell script, aka Dockerfile. Apparently it is n

> There are people who with a straight face claim configuration management is unnecessary if you have a single shell script, aka Dockerfile. Apparently it is not only unnecessary, it is an anti-pattern: https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/15x/presentations/configuration-management-anti-pattern https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/15x/presentations/confi... > You used to be able to write an app in C, pre-build it for a dozen platforms, then run it on a dozen platforms. Now you have to run everything on one platform (a virtualized containerized Linux environment) because anything else is literally impossible. You can still run the app anywhere - it just has five or six layers of virtualization, abstraction and tooling now. I see more and more "here is a Docker image!" things pop up for tiny shell script utilities on github. It's like autotools with 100x the complexity and "portable" to exactly one platform. People have no clue what they are doing, they just want any excuse to use Docker. > The container is supposed to be this read-only isolated self-sufficient jail, so good luck getting anything out of it without a bunch of hoops. You seriously need to specify 50 different config values just to do simple things like networking, writing to a persistent disk, picking what to run or stop, interacting with other apps. This is my biggest pain point with containers, and where I feel Docker marketing is lying the most. Docker is pitched as making development easier, when in fact containers significantly impede debugging. You even need special tools (like https://github.com/emacs-pe/docker-tramp.el https://github.com/emacs-pe/docker-tramp.el) to do the most basic tasks like look at files. The marketing hype is that all you need to solve production problems is a log server and a few line graphs of metrics (better hope you instrument your app code for the right metrics...). Add in microservices and now you need distributed tracing too. This extra infrastructure is a ton of work to set up for small apps.