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I switched to Orbstack about 2 weeks ago after having read about it here on HN. I develop a cloud native system entirely writen in Rust. All my own containers

I switched to Orbstack about 2 weeks ago after having read about it here on HN. I develop a cloud native system entirely writen in Rust. All my own containers are build without Docker thanks to rules oci in Bazel. However, for integration testing, I'm using internal tools that fire up, say a database container and run the tests all from within Bazel to leverage test caching and parallelization. For a while, i was struggling to get around Dockers slow startup time on Mac. My CI server uses Firecracker VM's to isolate OCI containers so it's really only a docker on Mac issue. My main take away: - I am so close to delete Docker permanently. There is no comparison, not even close. All integration tests run so much faster. - Especially parallel container starts a noticable faster. - I've developed custom docker utils for testing and, believe me, the official Docker API is a humongous pile of garbage that I ended up re-implementing everything by wrapping the Docker command line. To nobody's surprise, even the custom docker utils work way faster and more reliable with OrbStack. - Zero issues. I am still a little bit puzzled that OrbStack basically runs bug-free no matter what I throw at it. Take it as a compliment. What I would like to see: - A Ressource monitor or at least some graph that plots CPU and memory usage. In some rare cases the application in the container runs close to the limit probably because a query takes too long, a process got stuck or whatever. Stuff just happenens. Point is, having an eye on ressource usage helps to spot those corner cases early on. For me, OrbStack is a clear win and a clear keeper. Well done Orb team and I wish you guys all the success in the world.

oarmstrong 2y ago
> My CI server uses Firecracker VM's to isolate OCI containers Is this something you built yourself? I've been looking for a CI tool that uses Firecracker but never found anything, I started building something myself but it never really got finished. Would love to drop that project and use something off the shelf.
- aayushshah15 2y ago
  I'm obviously biased here but this is what we do at blacksmith dot sh. We run you GitHub Actions on consumer grade desktop CPUs with high single core performance, all inside ephemeral Firecracker VMs. Give us a shot!
- marvin-hansen 2y ago
  BuildBuddy. Google it. It's totally next level. My build is 70 crates, hundreds of unit tests, integration tests, multi platform docker images for two platforms, and everything is done in under 2 minutes, if it's slow(!). If I hit only an incremental change, build is completed within 30 seconds. The future is now!
rfoo 2y ago
I'm in a similar position but I need to make sure I run distro kernel (because that's part of integration) instead of whatever OrbStack shipped. In the end I just run a Linux VM and run everything inside. Zero issues by definition. I'd actually love to use OrbStack Machines cause it feels much nicer than UTM, but, well, I can't run OrbStack's patched Linux kernel :(
totetsu 2y ago
I did the same thing. Docker Desktop for Macos kept going into resource saving mode and then not responding to anything after some time, so I tried Orbstack after seeing it here.
princevegeta89 2y ago
I've been using Colima which has been great, and much better than Docker Desktop which sucked ass for me. With Colima, file mounting and sharing caused reliability and permission issues for me though I've applied some workarounds with success. To avoid this mess, I'd much rather move to a VM though. I used VMWare Fusion and UTM but I still had the struggles with file sharing between host and the guest. So I took a lot of steps back and I'm currently running a Lima VM with headless Ubuntu and things are great so far. For Vscode we got the remote SSH plugin and then there is the Jetbrains Gateway as well. I'm sharing my experiences for people in similar shoes to try these out, if that helps!

oarmstrong 2y ago

> My CI server uses Firecracker VM's to isolate OCI containers Is this something you built yourself? I've been looking for a CI tool that uses Firecracker but never found anything, I started building something myself but it never really got finished. Would love to drop that project and use something off the shelf.

aayushshah15 2y ago
I'm obviously biased here but this is what we do at blacksmith dot sh. We run you GitHub Actions on consumer grade desktop CPUs with high single core performance, all inside ephemeral Firecracker VMs. Give us a shot!
marvin-hansen 2y ago
BuildBuddy. Google it. It's totally next level. My build is 70 crates, hundreds of unit tests, integration tests, multi platform docker images for two platforms, and everything is done in under 2 minutes, if it's slow(!). If I hit only an incremental change, build is completed within 30 seconds. The future is now!

rfoo 2y ago

I'm in a similar position but I need to make sure I run distro kernel (because that's part of integration) instead of whatever OrbStack shipped. In the end I just run a Linux VM and run everything inside. Zero issues by definition. I'd actually love to use OrbStack Machines cause it feels much nicer than UTM, but, well, I can't run OrbStack's patched Linux kernel :(

totetsu 2y ago

I did the same thing. Docker Desktop for Macos kept going into resource saving mode and then not responding to anything after some time, so I tried Orbstack after seeing it here.

princevegeta89 2y ago

I've been using Colima which has been great, and much better than Docker Desktop which sucked ass for me. With Colima, file mounting and sharing caused reliability and permission issues for me though I've applied some workarounds with success. To avoid this mess, I'd much rather move to a VM though. I used VMWare Fusion and UTM but I still had the struggles with file sharing between host and the guest. So I took a lot of steps back and I'm currently running a Lima VM with headless Ubuntu and things are great so far. For Vscode we got the remote SSH plugin and then there is the Jetbrains Gateway as well. I'm sharing my experiences for people in similar shoes to try these out, if that helps!