scrubbles

scrubbles, 1 year ago

I’ll answer your question of why with your own frustration - bare metal is difficult. Every engineer uses a different language/framework/dependencies/whathaveyou and usually they’ll conflict with others. Docker solves this be containing those apps in their own space. Their code, projects, dependencies are already installed and taken care of, you don’t need to worry about it.

Take yourself out of homelab and put yourself into a sysadmin. Now instead of knowing how packages may conflict with others, or if updating this OS will break applications, you just need to know docker. If you know docker, you can run any docker app.

So, yes, volumes and environments are a bit difficult at first. But it’s difficult because it is a standard. Every docker container is going to need a couple mounts, a couple variables, a port or two open, and if you’re going crazy maybe a GPU. It doesn’t matter if you’re running 1 or 50 containers on a system, you aren’t going to get conflicts.

As for the security concerns, they are indeed security concerns. Again imagine you’re a sysadmin - you could direct developers that they can’t use root, that they need to be built on OS’s with the latest patches. But you’re at home, so you’re at the mercy of whoever built the image.

Now that being said, since you’re at their mercy, their code isn’t going to get much safer whether you run it bare-iron or containerized. So, do you want to spend hours for each app figuring out how to run it, or spend a few hours now to learn docker and then have it standardized?

scrubbles, 1 year ago

This is a really bad take. I’m all for OSS, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t value with things like Docker.

Yes, developers know less about infra. I’d argue that can be a good thing. I don’t need my devs to understand VLANs, the nuances of DNS, or any of that. I need them to code, and code well. That’s why we have devops/infra people. If my devs to know it? Awesome, but docker and containerization allows them to focus on code and let my ops teams figure out how they want to put it in production.

As for OSS - sure, someone can come along and make an OSS solution. Until then - I don’t really care. Same thing with cloud providers. It’s all well and good to have opinions about OSS, but when it comes to companies being able to push code quickly and scalably, then yeah I’m hiring the ops team who knows kubernetes and containerization vs someone who’s going to spend weeks trying to spin up bare iron machines.

scrubbles, 1 year ago

Your first sentence proves that it’s different. The developer needs to know it’s going to be a Deb package. What about rpm? What about if it’s going to run on mac? Windows? That means they’ll have to change how they develop to think about all of these different platforms. Oh you run windows - well windows doesn’t have openssl, so we need to do this vs that.

I’d recommend reading up on docker and containerization. It is not a script for setting up software. If that’s what you’re thought is then you really don’t understand containerization and I recommend taking some learnings on it. Like it or not it’s here, and if you’re doing any dev/ops work professionally you will be left behind for not understanding it.

scrubbles, 1 year ago

What does that make me being happily married as a senior engineer who knows most of those languages?

scrubbles, 1 year ago

Second there. Running kubernetes at home is great - to learn it for work.

If you don’t need to use it for work then you’re going to spend weeks if not months setting it up for very little payoff at home