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by chriswarbo 1195 days ago
> Docker serves the basic functionality of a container as well as any other

I disagree. We've had multiple production outages caused by the Docker daemon misbehaving (usually causing us to run out of disk space). It also makes operations far more difficult than necessary; e.g. want to copy a .tar.gz file to AWS? Sorry, Docker's gonna insert itself in the workflow, and over-complicate the authentication[1]. Instead, I have a script which runs [2] in a loop; much easier!

> The workflows that forced you to migrate away from it are more complicated, I’m sure, than a procedurally defined dev environment.

The container I mentioned literally just runs `java -jar` with a pre-built .jar file. Nothing fancy. Still, I have no idea what it's running, since Docker allows mutable tags, and there's no reference to a version number, let alone a git revision.

> Your comment further pushes me away from Nix, really, even without mentioning it. It makes it seem even more like a tool that’s not for me

I wasn't talking about Nix, I was talking about Docker. They're very different tools (Docker manages running processes/containers; Nix describes the contents of files). I just really hate Docker, and am baffled when people say it's "easy".

> but rather for much more complicated things.

You're giving me too much credit. It took me days to even get Docker installed. It turned out that despite a mountain of documentation telling me to install "Docker Machine", that's actually been discontinued for years and I should have been installing "Docker Desktop" instead.

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECR/latest/userguide/getti...

[2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/ecr/upload-...

1 comments

On the other hand Docker was quite easy for me to install... because I used nix to do it.