4 ms·

I personally love alpine, I’ve been exploring it outside of docker and has proven to be a great canvas for deploying apps. Hope to see more cloud providers supp

I personally love alpine, I’ve been exploring it outside of docker and has proven to be a great canvas for deploying apps. Hope to see more cloud providers support alpine as an option.

DeepYogurt 8y ago
What makes it more appealing than say arch, gentoo, debian, etc...?
- petre 8y ago
  Lightweight, simple, no systemd, quite a big selection of up to date packages, like Arch.
  - artellectual 8y ago
    Yeah pretty much. What he said, up-to-date packages mean I don’t need to build my own ruby / elixir / python / node, I just reference them when building my application package, and it’s done. The way I’m using it now is I just build alpine packages and host a private repository. When I get a fresh alpine install I install my package and I’m done.
- erichurkman 8y ago
  For me it's that the things I install are deliberate. I have to opt into installing every extra package, so I am more thoughtful in expanding the base image. I liken it more to my fond days with FreeBSD and OpenBSD. A narrowly scoped base image and userland, but easy access to a vast array of packages/ports, but each explicitly listed and installed. It's "batteries included" but "pick your batteries" vs "here's a kitchen sink full of batteries."
  - dharmab 8y ago
    Running applications on Alpine feels like very deliberately building an environment, whether inside a container or directly on a host. (Just be aware of the differences between glibc and musl... DNS resolution in particular will bite you if you don't understand the implementation)
    - mwarkentin 8y ago
      Have any details about the DNS resolution stuff?
      - dharmab 8y ago
        TL;DR musl attempts to query every resolver in parallel. This can cause problems if: - If your resolvers are VIPs for the same process or machine, you can triple you DNS load and overload some crappy DNS dispatchers - If you try to use multiple resolvers that resolve the same names with different records, you can kind of make it work with glibc but you will have severe problems with musl. This is a bad idea in the first place though

I personally love alpine, I’ve been exploring it outside of docker and has proven to be a great canvas for deploying apps. Hope to see more cloud providers support alpine as an option.

DeepYogurt 8y ago

What makes it more appealing than say arch, gentoo, debian, etc...?

petre 8y ago
Lightweight, simple, no systemd, quite a big selection of up to date packages, like Arch.
- artellectual 8y ago
  Yeah pretty much. What he said, up-to-date packages mean I don’t need to build my own ruby / elixir / python / node, I just reference them when building my application package, and it’s done. The way I’m using it now is I just build alpine packages and host a private repository. When I get a fresh alpine install I install my package and I’m done.
erichurkman 8y ago
For me it's that the things I install are deliberate. I have to opt into installing every extra package, so I am more thoughtful in expanding the base image. I liken it more to my fond days with FreeBSD and OpenBSD. A narrowly scoped base image and userland, but easy access to a vast array of packages/ports, but each explicitly listed and installed. It's "batteries included" but "pick your batteries" vs "here's a kitchen sink full of batteries."
- dharmab 8y ago
  Running applications on Alpine feels like very deliberately building an environment, whether inside a container or directly on a host. (Just be aware of the differences between glibc and musl... DNS resolution in particular will bite you if you don't understand the implementation)
  - mwarkentin 8y ago
    Have any details about the DNS resolution stuff?
    - dharmab 8y ago
      TL;DR musl attempts to query every resolver in parallel. This can cause problems if: - If your resolvers are VIPs for the same process or machine, you can triple you DNS load and overload some crappy DNS dispatchers - If you try to use multiple resolvers that resolve the same names with different records, you can kind of make it work with glibc but you will have severe problems with musl. This is a bad idea in the first place though