Programming

Hi!

First I'd like to clarify that I'm not "anti-container/Docker". 😅

There is a lot of discussion on this article (with my comments!) going on over at Tildes. I don't wanna copy-paste everything from there, but I'll share the first main response I gave to someone who had very similar feedback to kick-start some discussion on those points here as well:

Some high level points on the "why":

• Reproducibility: Docker builds are not reproducible, and especially in a company with more than a handful of developers, it's nice not to have to worry about a docker build command in the on-boarding docs failing inexplicably (from the POV of the regular joe developer) from one day to the next

• Cost: Docker licenses for most companies now cost $9/user/month (minimum of 5 seats required) - this is very steep for something that doesn't guarantee reproducibility and has poor performance to boot (see below)

• Performance: Docker performance on macOS (and Windows), especially storage mount performance remains poor; this is even more acutely felt when working with languages like Node where the dependencies are file-count heavy. Sure, you could just issue everyone Linux laptops, but these days hiring is hard enough without shooting yourself in the foot by not providing a recent MBP to new devs by default

I think it's also worth drawing a line between containers as a local development tool and containers as a deployment artifact, as the above points don't really apply to the latter.