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0 pointstakeda8y ago0 comments

This is what I noticed as well. Most of things containers are advocated for are already solved.

The selling point of containers is to solve certain issues (seems like package management, removing dependency on the OS etc are the most popular).

To me it looks like instead fixing the actual issues, we are taking a blanket covering all of that crap and building our beautiful solution on top of that. We have a beautiful world with unicorns on top of a dumpster fire of mixing system dependencies with our application dependencies.

Also yesterday found something amusing a coworker was complaining that putting a small app into a base container resulted with image that was almost 1GB in size, compared to ~50MB when using a minimalistic one. When asked why not just use the minimalistic one I learned that it was mandated to use the standard image for everything.

To me this is absurd since by doing that aren't we essentially making a full circle?

0 comments

Apaec8y ago

Absolutely. I think the actual issue are the OSes directory structure(FHS for example) that impedes having libs/packages isolated and coexisting with their different versions.

Containers add a heavy abstraction on top of that. For me the simpler/better dependency management solution is nix.

johannes128y ago

No, and it makes perfect sense because 1. Container size is a minor issue, docker images are layered so you only fetch the diff of what's on top anyway 2. Standardization simplifies knowledge sharing, i.e. someone else can help you