this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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I wish he had written why he's so anti-container/docker. That's a pretty unusual stance I haven't been exposed to yet.
Hi!
First I'd like to clarify that I'm not "anti-container/Docker". π
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 buildcommand in the on-boarding docs failing inexplicably (from the POV of the regular joe developer) from one day to the nextCost: 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.
If your dev documentation includes your devs running
docker build, you're doing docker wrong.The whole point is that you can build a working container image and then ship it to a registry (including private registries) so that your other developers/users/etc don't have to build them and can just run the existing image.
Then for development, you simply use a bind mount to ensure your local copy of the code is available in the container instead of the copy the container was built with.
That doesn't solve the performance issues on Windows and Mac, but it does prevent the "my environment is broke" issues that docker is designed to solve
Agreed, we still do this in the areas where we use Docker at day job.
I think the mileage with this approach can vary depending on the languages in use and the velocity of feature iteration (ie. if the company is still tweaking product-market fit, pivoting to a new vertical, etc.).
I've lost count of the number of times where a team decides they need to
npm installsomething with a heavynode-gypstep to build native modules which require yet another obscure system dependency that is not in the base layer. π