Why does this feel like it’s a flat-earth slide? I haven’t looked at any flat-earth propaganda, but I strongly suspect that it looks a lot like this.
That said, I’ll stick with my VMs regardless. I like simplicity.
I would vote for docker as well. The last time I had to inherit a system that ran on virtual machines, it was quite a pain to figure out how the software was installed, what was where in the file system, and where all the configuration was coming from. Replicating that setup took months of preparation.
By contrast, with Docker, all your setup is documented. The commands that were used to install our software into the virtual machines and were long gone are present right there in the Docker file. And building the code? An even bigger win for Docker. In the VM project, the build environment for the C++ portion of our codebase was configured by about a dozen environment variables, none of which were documented. If it were built in Docker, all the necessary environment variables would have been right there in the build environment. Not to mention the build commands themselves would be there too, whereas with VMs, we would often have developers build locally and then copy it into the VM, which was terrible for reproducibility and onboarding new developers.
That said, this all comes down to execution - a well-managed VM system can easily be much better than a poorly managed Docker system. But in general, I feel that Docker tends to be easier to work with than a VM. While Docker is far from flawless, there are a lot more things that can make life harder with VMs, at least from my experience.
Reject whale, join the kubernetes cluster.
We have fully automated gay space crashloopbackoff!
Reject kubernetes, join the Juju cluster.
We have “save your wallet hundreds of thousands by not automatically spinning up a crapton of resources if your app does an oopsie”! And we have “simply run on any public cloud or in your own datacenter with MAAS or locally with LXD”!
For real though, containerization isn’t the only way to separate applications from each other but totally fine, it’s the “It works on my machine, so here’s my machine” mentality that doesn’t fill me with confidence. I’ve seen too much barely-working jank in containers that probably only get updated when a new version of the containerized application itself is released.
It creates a set of symlinks so every program sees exactly the dependencies it needs.
https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/09-automatic-runtime-dependencies#automatic-runtime-dependencies
You can also create a container:
https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_Containers
Or you can create reproducible docker containers with nix:
https://dev.to/anurag_vishwakarma/a-better-way-to-build-reproducible-docker-images-with-nix-2k59
The secret sauce with nix is reproducibility. If it builds once, it will continue building exactly like that forever. Bit by bit.
What gets me is people migrating from VMs treating it like an entire host machine.
There is a lack of knowledge among developers regarding precompiling assets and classes (if interpreted), and people are trying to do too much in startup scripts.
Another thing I hate is wrapping the entire process in a script because people want to kill the main process without restarting the container. Yikes!
Containers are a great way run applications.
Docker is a piece of garbage by a company way too far down the enshittification slide.
I wish I understood this because it seems funny
Moral of the story: never make breaking changes. Always backwards compatible, always.
