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by sergiosgc 2475 days ago
> VirtualBox feels like installing a regular computer. It takes a long time and is a lot of manual work. If you want to change something you login on the existing VM until you reach a point where you no longer remember all the changes you've made over the years. The machine is unclean.

Unfair comparison. People running on VMs usually rely on configuration management to do the install+config part. Think of stuff like Ansible as a Dockerfile for VMs/bare-metal.
1 comments
Spivak 2475 days ago
Config management isn't a magic bullet. At the core every config management platform is manual work in a for loop. Lot's of layers in the case of Salt/Puppet to make it a bit more ergonomic but you're ultimately still on the hook for all the server maintenance. No config management is all-encompassing and so without extreme diligence you will lose the state of your servers over time.

I use Ansible all day every day -- it's not comparable container tooling in the slightest.

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aeorgnoieang 2474 days ago
Containers aren't a magic bullet either. Surely the core of container systems is also "manual work in a for loop". You're right that the default 'ephemerality' of containers is (or can be) a plus but config management tools don't require one to treat one's servers as 'pets'.

> No config management is all-encompassing and so without extreme diligence you will lose the state of your servers over time.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "all-encompassing". Surely all of the popular config management systems have 'escape hatches' to let you do anything you could do from a shell, which seems pretty "all-encompassing" to me. But if you mean the config management system don't completely enforce a specific 'state' for managed servers then of course you're correct. Containers don't do that either, beyond periodically replacing running containers with new ones created from a base image (and even that's almost certainly not perfect either).

Unless your container hosts are entirely managed by someone else (and probably even not then, in the fullness of time), you're always going to "lose the state of your servers over time". There's (almost always?) some state somewhere that has to be explicitly managed and thus requires, generally, "extreme diligence".

I do agree that containerization and config management are very different but, like everything, it's 'just' another set of tradeoffs to be made, hopefully depending on one's actual or expected needs and wants.

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notyourday 2475 days ago
> I use Ansible all day every day -- it's not comparable container tooling in the slightest.

Only if you are not actually cleanly managing containers. With containers you just pile the shit into them, close the doors and say "Oh look, we have a clean surface!" which is certainly fine in the dev.

If it is fine in production, then it does not matter if the shit is in containers, VMs, dedicated servers, etc. Container may as well be curl http://mylservice/containername.img followed by dd if=containername.img of=/dev/sdb ; set-boot-flag-sdb ; reboot

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