[JohnMakin]

Oof, in his reasons to use docker (which it seems like he uses as a synonym for containerization), misses probably the most important one -

6. Provides an additional layer of security between the application and its host

As far as his availability concerns, I don't see why running or not running docker would help this problem. You can certainly build highly available nginx reverse proxies in docker, and can do in place upgrades with no downtime. This has been solved for a very long time.

[SPascareli13]

Docker (and containers in general) adds namespacing, but not security, for applications. If anything, docker can add MORE attack vectors.

No one should use containers primarily for security ever.

[banish-m4]

Correct. Docker adds minimal isolation, basically what Linux provides through cgroups, which is quite porous and lacking hard resource limits. It's definitely not even close to the security and resource isolation guarantees provided by virtualization. If one wanted manageability and isolation, then they could run k8s and Kata Containers which uses virtualization instead of containerd. If it were me running 1 little app on a pair of HA boxes on the world wild web, I would probably use FreeBSD and jails or runj.

[JohnMakin]

> If one wanted manageability and isolation, then they could run k8s and Kata Containers which uses virtualization instead of containerd.

There is a world that exists outside your own use cases (and gke). EKS provides isolation by default, just as one example I can pull from my own career. you can even get warnings out of the box if any process gets access to the host, and the typical convention is to lock these hosts down entirely. No need to access the machine at all and everything is isolated within it.

Generally the type of infra advice AWS provides is fairly sound depending on what you want to pay, but I assure you what you just said is not true everywhere.

[ebenes]

I'm no expert in hardening for server security like SELinux.

As far as my understanding goes containers per se are no security mechanism. Rootless containers are as good as rootless processes with chroot.

So this comment resonates with my understanding.

My feeling is that containers give you more possibilities to introduce security holes if you aren't diligent.

[JohnMakin]

Sorry but what you said makes absolutely no sense. The security implication I am talking about is that in a typical container the application cannot escalate privilege out of the container and touch the host, with the exception of obvious things like shared file systems, etc. This is a known benefit of containerization and not at all controversial.

[SPascareli13]

The thing about your comment is that it seems that you believe containers are something you use for added security, and that is very much not the case.

But I don't disagree about rootless containers being more secure than rooted ones, just as much as any process not running as root has less privileges then one running as root.

[sgarland]

Bold of you to assume that most devs are running containers with a non-root user.

[xnyan]

Devs maybe, but the author is talking about production environments which are definitely moving to rootless.

[bravetraveler]

'Production' is an interesting appeal to authority, if I may risk using terms improperly.

My 'toy' controller/replica are production but due to planning - have no weight. Two people care in the 'oh that's mildly inconvenient' sense when they break. Everything moves on.

To lean into hyperbole a bit: for every shop that's rootless, there are nine that are rootful.

I don't say any of this to be defeatist, more... realistic. There's:

    1) what people say they do 
    2) what people actually do

These can be, but don't have to be, the same.

It's surely trending positively, but I'm also not interested in arguing about window dressing while the house is on fire.

What does SELinux or AppArmor look like in this hypothetical, disabled per usual? Plenty of work to do. No pats on the back yet.

I say all of this a bit heavily - not OP. Closely related to some heated talks I've had this week. It's easy to bike-shed endlessly

[JohnMakin]

rootless has been the standard convention for a long time. if you’re in any industry that gets regulularly audited this is one of the first things they look for.