[jka]

Docker is still pretty embedded in a lot of workflows, thanks in part to its use by-default in many Kubernetes distributions, and the popularity of Docker Hub - not to mention various tutorials and scripts which refer to docker tooling.

But yep, I'd agree with the general premise here - with the emergence of tools like cri-o[0], podman and buildah (which let you build and ship container images without the need to run a background daemon like docker at all, avoiding the associated operational/security/system overheads) - docker may need to evolve or it'll quickly become less favourable.

Project Atomic[1] runs a good PPA with many of these packages for anyone interested and using Ubuntu.

[0] https://cri-o.io/

[1] http://www.projectatomic.io/

[lioeters]

Thank you for pointing out these emerging tools. They seem to be the next steps beyond Docker, built on the lessons learned.

Project Atomic's website is down at the moment - checking their GitHub, the site hasn't been updated in a while? https://github.com/projectatomic/atomic-site

Links for future reference, for myself and others:

Podman - https://podman.io/

Buildah - https://buildah.io/

Open Container Initiative - https://www.opencontainers.org/

[raesene9]

From what little I've looked at podman, the "no daemon, rootless" story isn't quite as straightforward as it might appear.

For starters, you couldn't expose ports as a standard user running podman last time I used it . Also every container got it's own conmon process, so there's still an overhead, it's just done differently.

[jka]

Fair point re: conmon, and yep, even in the strictest sense of the word, it is a daemon now that I read up on how it executes the container.

I guess it's better to say that only a monitoring daemon is required with this setup (rather than all of the additional daemon services that docker provides).

Re: rootless podman, it looks like there's a good resource to track progress here: https://github.com/containers/libpod/blob/v1.6.2/rootless.md - that must be a common ask, could be interesting to track.

(I'm definitely guilty of being overoptimistic about these tools, but do hope they improve because the principles behind them seem very sound)