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0 pointstcdent6h ago0 comments

The concept of developing on a system which does not closely mirror your production environment died with virtualization and containerization over a decade ago. You will experience unforeseen consequences if your development environment does not emulate your production environment as closely as possible.

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3 comments · 2 top-level

ramraj075h ago· 1 in thread

You may have been lucky or privileged in working in high competency environments where the essence of containerization is truly captured in the dev practices. The vast majority of mediocre eng shops do "dockerize everything" but would still end up with leaks everywhere, artifacts in s3, endpoint dependencies, mounts that depend on the helm chart etc.

IMO containerization as a principle has failed the test of making mediocre teams productive. Such teams cargo cult ape on this term and think because they've done it theyre now webscale.

I personally like to still start with "this code should run anywhere" principle. On python especially with uv now this seems like a safer bet. At the least this forces the engineers to explicitly list out stupid dependencies in the reader.

tcdentOP5h ago

I mean, to be honest, I'm the one who sets the precedent for most of the teams that I work with; that's one of my roles.

And personally, I don't necessarily follow a hard line with this. My Python API services run foregrounded in a terminal with uv run, but that doesn't mean that I'm using SQLite instead of Postgres. Any of the backend services I need that don't make sense to be foregrounded still run the same versions as prod containerized. And front end teams will tend to run a containerized API service since they're not modifying it as often.

Point being there is some conscious leeway here, but it's bounded and well-defined.

lylejantzi3rd3h ago

I agree that this isn't communicated well, but I think the idea he's going for has nothing to do with virtualization or containerization. It's reducing all application level actions to a sequence of events, complete with the data that would get passed in. That way, you can replay production events, complete with production data, locally for debugging purposes.

Unfortunately, that also makes this a PII security nightmare.

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