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I'm so glad someone finally said this publically. Everyone always writes posts about how magical docker is, but the reality is that Docker more of a PR engine t

by thebyrd 12y ago

I'm so glad someone finally said this publically. Everyone always writes posts about how magical docker is, but the reality is that Docker more of a PR engine then a usable production virtualization solution.

lifty 12y ago
I used Puppet for about 4 years in a critical production environment and let me tell you, Docker is not only hype. The reason why a lot of people(including me) are excited about Docker is because it brings a clean architectural paradigm to the masses, the same one used at Google and Heroku, the same one that many of us struggled to build behind closed doors at various companies. People that have used configuration management tools at scale in complex environments have seen that managing state using those respective tools can quickly become tedious. Although the recommendations of the author are fair, its takes a lot of effort to manage state drift on a whole platform using a configuration management tool. But if you use Docker, you will already be forced to think and do things in this new paradigm where there is separation between your data, business logic and service state. You can theoretically achieve the same things with CM tools, but its just harder. While the whole Docker ecosystem is immature, and people dont know how to deal with things once they get past 1 machine, its getting there and there is slowly more knowledge on how to do service discovery, logging, etc. in large environments. Im sure that in a few years we will look the same way at Docker(and other container tech) like we do at "heavy" virtualization now.
- zobzu 12y ago
  I agree the concept is sound, that said Docker is quite a bit of a PR engine as the parent comment said. It also is far from mature enough for most. When it fails, good luck finding out whats happening, they don't log stuff. It needs a lot of management around it. Itll be much more useful when stuff like Flynn takes off, or when someone rewrite this stuff/fix this stuff for average sys admins (and by average im not saying theyre bad, im saying not everyone has an idle army of sysadmins just waiting to fix stuff)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
markbnj 12y ago
You're right that it is not a usable virtualization solution... because it is not a virtualization solution at all. Docker is a dependency management tool. To the extent that you're using virtualization for dependency management then Docker is an excellent alternative due to its lower operating overhead. If you're using virtualization for resource allocation and management, then Docker is not such a good fit. As someone who has used it quite a bit over the last six months I bristle a bit at the suggestion that it is merely a "PR engine," by which I assume you mean "something that isn't really new or useful but that garners a lot of attention." Not an accurate observation at all, in my opinion.

by thebyrd 12y ago

lifty 12y ago

I used Puppet for about 4 years in a critical production environment and let me tell you, Docker is not only hype. The reason why a lot of people(including me) are excited about Docker is because it brings a clean architectural paradigm to the masses, the same one used at Google and Heroku, the same one that many of us struggled to build behind closed doors at various companies. People that have used configuration management tools at scale in complex environments have seen that managing state using those respective tools can quickly become tedious. Although the recommendations of the author are fair, its takes a lot of effort to manage state drift on a whole platform using a configuration management tool. But if you use Docker, you will already be forced to think and do things in this new paradigm where there is separation between your data, business logic and service state. You can theoretically achieve the same things with CM tools, but its just harder. While the whole Docker ecosystem is immature, and people dont know how to deal with things once they get past 1 machine, its getting there and there is slowly more knowledge on how to do service discovery, logging, etc. in large environments. Im sure that in a few years we will look the same way at Docker(and other container tech) like we do at "heavy" virtualization now.

zobzu 12y ago
I agree the concept is sound, that said Docker is quite a bit of a PR engine as the parent comment said. It also is far from mature enough for most. When it fails, good luck finding out whats happening, they don't log stuff. It needs a lot of management around it. Itll be much more useful when stuff like Flynn takes off, or when someone rewrite this stuff/fix this stuff for average sys admins (and by average im not saying theyre bad, im saying not everyone has an idle army of sysadmins just waiting to fix stuff)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

markbnj 12y ago

You're right that it is not a usable virtualization solution... because it is not a virtualization solution at all. Docker is a dependency management tool. To the extent that you're using virtualization for dependency management then Docker is an excellent alternative due to its lower operating overhead. If you're using virtualization for resource allocation and management, then Docker is not such a good fit. As someone who has used it quite a bit over the last six months I bristle a bit at the suggestion that it is merely a "PR engine," by which I assume you mean "something that isn't really new or useful but that garners a lot of attention." Not an accurate observation at all, in my opinion.