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> Dockerfiles are great and concise for apps (put files here, start by running this command, etc.). Chef/Puppet are great for pretty much the rest of the stack

by shykes 13y ago

> Dockerfiles are great and concise for apps (put files here, start by running this command, etc.). Chef/Puppet are great for pretty much the rest of the stack upwards. Packer comes into play there. You really don't need packer to use Chef in a docker build. Just install Chef as part of your build, add your cookbooks, and run chef with the arguments of your choice. That's 3 extra lines in your Dockerfile. As a bonus, you get to manage the exact build and version of chef to use, using the exact same syntax and toolbox as for the rest of your software stack. At the end day, chef is just that - software. Why make it a hardcoded special case? See for example this blog post: http://tech.paulcz.net/2013/09/creating-immutable-servers-with-chef-and-docker-dot-io.html http://tech.paulcz.net/2013/09/creating-immutable-servers-wi...

mitchellh 13y ago
That's very true, although there is usually quite a lot more to configuring Chef, I can see that it can be done without too much complication using Dockerfiles. I apologize for not mentioning this. I prefer Chef (or some other provisioners) as a special case because it is a common case. It is just software, but if all your servers (or a majority) are configured using Chef, its nice to have an abstraction to make this easy. The same argument could've been said for Vagrant early on, probably: I could've just supported shell scripts, because shell scripts could install Chef, then run Chef. Perhaps so, but having the "just set this one to handful of options and you get Chef for free" functionality was a big win for both Vagrant and Chef adoption (as well as other provisioners, I'm just using Chef as an example here). Likewise, I'm finding that having Docker as a special case in Packer/Vagrant is doing the same: it is educating more people about Docker with a low barrier and bringing more people into an ecosystem I like (VMs, containerization, immutability, or any mix there-in). I'm super excited about where Docker is headed, and glad containers are finally reaching a point where they're friendlier for laypeople (as in... not super experienced Linux sysadmins) can use them. :)

by shykes 13y ago

mitchellh 13y ago

That's very true, although there is usually quite a lot more to configuring Chef, I can see that it can be done without too much complication using Dockerfiles. I apologize for not mentioning this. I prefer Chef (or some other provisioners) as a special case because it is a common case. It is just software, but if all your servers (or a majority) are configured using Chef, its nice to have an abstraction to make this easy. The same argument could've been said for Vagrant early on, probably: I could've just supported shell scripts, because shell scripts could install Chef, then run Chef. Perhaps so, but having the "just set this one to handful of options and you get Chef for free" functionality was a big win for both Vagrant and Chef adoption (as well as other provisioners, I'm just using Chef as an example here). Likewise, I'm finding that having Docker as a special case in Packer/Vagrant is doing the same: it is educating more people about Docker with a low barrier and bringing more people into an ecosystem I like (VMs, containerization, immutability, or any mix there-in). I'm super excited about where Docker is headed, and glad containers are finally reaching a point where they're friendlier for laypeople (as in... not super experienced Linux sysadmins) can use them. :)