[kjkjadksj]

Whats wrong with make or dare I even suggest a package manager like conda? I get having a half dozen dependencies can be specified in tools like docker but its just another way to do the same old task thats been solved a dozen ways for decades. We are sharing a shell script here. Seems crazy to me to run an entire redundant file system to share a couple hundred line bash script. Plus now users need docker skills as well as command line skills to install and run this tooling. There are corners of the command line user/programmer world that have thankfully not been polluted by docker yet so its not nearly as widespread a tool as setting up environments for bash scripts using some older ways.

[swozey]

I think you're seeing this from the perspective of someone who runs a container for development and not someone who has to run a development container at hyperscale.

We can't pass around bash scripts anymore. Every system has to be fungible, reproducible en masse and as agnostic to the underlying technology its on as possible.

[kjkjadksj]

You aren’t writing machine code that can run on anything though, you have this docker dependency in order to run the container. Its just trading one dependency for another because docker is in style these days. I don’t think deploying bash scripts at scale was some insurmountable challenge before docker showed up.

[swozey]

We don't have a "docker dependency" - we run OCI containers. You're equating Docker which is a tooling eco system with containers.

Containers have been around for a LONG time, Solaris, jails, cgroups, etc are all built-in to the kernels we use today.

You don't need to use docker.

The idea is fungible services, whether it's literally just a container that starts with a go binary I can quickly scale 1000s of COMPLETELY independent processes and ORCHESTRATE THEM over thousands of clusters from one centralized system.

If I need to shift 1000s of that one go binary to US-WEST-1 because US-EAST-1 is down I can run automate it or run one command based on a kubernetes tag label and shift traffic.

These are just a few of the massive benefits we get with containers.

I can deploy an ENTIRE datacenter with a yaml file. My ENTIRE companies infrasture MTTR (mean time to recovery) from a total outage, starting from a github repo is less than 35 minutes and we're a billion dollar company and 80% of that time is starting load balancers and clusters. The only NOT agnostic hardware stuff in any of this are the load balancers and network related things as each provider has its own apis, IAM/Policies, etc that are completely unique between providers/datacenters. Nothing cares about what ram, distro, cpu or anything else is being used, we can deploy anywhere ARM or x86.

Without containers I would need a $150k F5 load balancer to distribute load between a ton of $30k dell poweredeges (and I'd need this x1000's).

I've been in Infrastructure for 15+ years at massive scale, webhosts, cdns, I do NOT want to go back to not using containers ever. None of my team writes any non container code or infra. The FIRST thing we do in every single repo is make a dockerfile and docker-compose.yml to easily work on things and every single server any company has in the last decade of my SRE career we've migrated to containers and never once regretted it.