[wmf]

I just saw a submission on the "demise" of Cloud Foundry (a Heroku-like PaaS) that's relevant to this discussion: https://medium.com/@krishnan/lessons-from-the-demise-of-clou...

Opinionated Platforms Are Risky: The CloudFoundry platform was more opinionated than some competing platforms in the market. In fact, the biggest debate between CloudFoundry and its direct competitors was about whether customers need opinionated platforms or not. CloudFoundry only supported 12 factor applications whereas platforms built on top of Kubernetes could support both stateful and stateless (12 factor) applications.

If you're building a stateless 12-factor app and there's a buildpack that does what you want, buildpacks are clearly better than lower-level Dockerfiles. But there's no buildpack for something like a database and there probably never will be, so the flexibility of directly building containers needs to exist.

[ekcasey]

Now that Cloud Native Buildpacks build OCI images instead of platform specific artifacts (slugs or droplets), developers can choose the best build solution for their problem (buildpacks for 12-factor apps, Dockerfiles for a data store)and deploy them to the same container orchestrator.

[jacques_chester]

> But there's no buildpack for something like a database and there probably never will be

That's why Cloud Foundry pioneered the Open Service Broker API.

For what it's worth, that article's recounting of history has substantial variations from my own recollection of history.

[rtpg]

Why can't we have a buildpack for a Database but Docker would be fine?