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As I see it, there are roughly four main related features that Docker brings, though it is far from the only solution to bring these features: 1. The ability t

As I see it, there are roughly four main related features that Docker brings, though it is far from the only solution to bring these features: 1. The ability to create services in a clean slate environment. Unix processes tend to inherit by default most environment attributes--working directory, open file descriptors, etc.--and having a way to create a process (or group of processes) without inheriting all of that stuff is easy. 2. Virtualization/isolation in a lighter weight solution than a full virtual machine. 3. Checkpointing that allows you to consistently restart an image with a given configuration, even if you go on to horribly destroy it in tests or whatnot. 4. A language for designing how to construct these images (the Dockerfile). I suspect the popularity of Docker mostly comes from the latter, and I'd definitely like to see something like that but utilizing jails and ZFS features instead.

hotnfresh 3y ago
My primary use of Docker is as an isolated-installation package manager that’s portable cross-distro and cross-distro-version with exceptionally well-documented and easy-to-test config locations and data storage paths (so much easier to be sure you’ve backed up everything you need to). Docker minus the giant well-populated well-maintained image library would be almost useless to me. [edit] one daemon improved immeasurably by Docker is Samba, of all things. The invocations are a little arcane, but once you’ve got them figured out it’s one extra option line to add a user, one line to add a share, repeat as needed. So very much better than relying on distro-magic to make it work, or, god forbid, trying to configure it manually with some config file that ends up inexplicably having no portability, or is silently ignored despite the claims of the docs, or doesn’t work at all because there’s some option commented out by default that definitely shouldn’t be. Docker forced them to finally make the “I just want to share a damn directory, to these users, either read only or read-write” use case, which is probably the vast majority of use of Samba, straightforward, concise, and reliable to configure.

hotnfresh 3y ago

My primary use of Docker is as an isolated-installation package manager that’s portable cross-distro and cross-distro-version with exceptionally well-documented and easy-to-test config locations and data storage paths (so much easier to be sure you’ve backed up everything you need to). Docker minus the giant well-populated well-maintained image library would be almost useless to me. [edit] one daemon improved immeasurably by Docker is Samba, of all things. The invocations are a little arcane, but once you’ve got them figured out it’s one extra option line to add a user, one line to add a share, repeat as needed. So very much better than relying on distro-magic to make it work, or, god forbid, trying to configure it manually with some config file that ends up inexplicably having no portability, or is silently ignored despite the claims of the docs, or doesn’t work at all because there’s some option commented out by default that definitely shouldn’t be. Docker forced them to finally make the “I just want to share a damn directory, to these users, either read only or read-write” use case, which is probably the vast majority of use of Samba, straightforward, concise, and reliable to configure.