[TZubiri]

Or run no registry. Here's a port from a Dockerfile to just a vm:

FROM Debian

CMD apt-get install thing

CMD curl blabla/install.sh

Pretty much converts to:

aws-cli ec2 launch-instance

ssh user@server apt-get install thing

ssh user@server curl blabla/install.sh

In general, everytime you dispense of a high level abstraction, the solution is not to replicate the high level abstraction, but to build directly at a lower level abstraction.

If you want to replace burgers, just buy a slab of meat and put it in the fire or bake your own bread. You don't need to make preservants and buy artificial sweeteners, etc...

[planb]

We're not talking about Dockerfiles here, but about images from a registry.

How many times faster and more reproducible is "docker run myimage:1.0.0" compared to your solution?

[TZubiri]

The thing with containerization is that it is sometimes used to virtualize an OS and sometimes to virtualize processes.

My containerless worflow, when compared to typical container workflows, usually involves splitting some of the responsibilities to the OS virtualization layer and some to the process layer.

For example, if I have a testing server and a prod server, to test a change I just git push to the testing branch. Which is quite fast and reproducible.

Yes in theory there can be side effects and leftover effects from the previous version, but I am also a competent programmer and have the capacity to ssh into the server to debug, so it's not a huge issue. So bottomline I don't virtualize as often.

To take a wildly different use case of containers, if I want to have two different systems on the same machine, I just run the two different systems as processes? You know there's a process for a sql db and an http server in the server and we are fine. You can even use users for more stringent encapsulation and security guarantees, it's fine.

But since we are talking about registries, I focused on the third distinct use case deployment automation.

The whole details on how to live without docker (and docker registries by extension) won't fit a hacker news comment, but be assured it's 100% possible and you'll be fine.

I'm focusing on docker as a whole because if I can prove that you don't need Docker, by extension I prove you don't need a docker registry. It's an overkill of an argument to show how ridiculous complaining about your free docker registries is. You are out here complaining about a problem with your Docker registries, while I'm a chad who can just axe Docker like it's nothing.

[planb]

> The thing with containerization is that it is sometimes used to virtualize an OS and sometimes to virtualize processes.

You can use any tool wrong - that does not make the tool obsolete.

> The whole details on how to live without docker (and docker registries by extension) won't fit a hacker news comment

An explanation how to do the same with docker WOULD fit in a hacker news comment. Sometim, abstractions are useful, even if they add another layer on top of existing stuff (and more dependencies).

[TZubiri]

"You can use any tool wrong - that does not make the tool obsolete."

It's not wrong to virtualize an OS or processes, it's its whole raison d'etre. Also very common see:

https://hub.docker.com/_/debian

https://hub.docker.com/_/postgres

"An explanation how to do the same with docker WOULD fit in a hacker news comment. Sometim, abstractions are useful, even if they add another layer on top of existing stuff (and more dependencies)."

There's so many usecases for docker/( kernel)virtualization that you most certainly cannot fit it in a comment. But I would be entertained if you tried.

Virtualization is as generic and flexible as a programming language, you really can use it to do anything a Turing machine can do.

[bartread]

Careful now: people will start accusing you of NIH.

But I fully agree with you. Likely what you need is a tiny subset of the capabilities wrapped up by the higher level abstraction, so implement them directly.

Over time you may find you need additional capabilities (although that's far from a given) and, if and when you do, you'll need to make decisions about whether to implement them directly, or wrap everything in a higher level abstraction (or use a third party abstraction).

The point is that if you ever do need these additional capabilities there's a good chance it's because you've been successful enough to enter "good problem to have" territory because you didn't waste time getting distracted by them earlier on and instead chose to focus on work that enabled that success.

[marginalia_nu]

If you wanna NIH you can just build your own docker. It's just an abstraction around some newer syscalls for process isolation. There's really not much magic to be found if you look into how it's done.

You can probably have a working prototype up in a weekend if you've got some systems programming experience.

[bartread]

I'm sure this has been on HN more than once but here's Bocker as an example of what you're talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42224670

[sherburt3]

Just look at how much shorter and nicer the docker example is compared to the VM example. Also first example runs locally on any computer with docker or podman or whatever installed, second example exclusively runs on AWS.

[TZubiri]

"Just look at how much shorter and nicer the docker example is compared to the VM example."

Is this trolling? Who gives a shit? It's 3 lines that will be buried deep in the stack. You can even do it manually Gasp. and write the steps with screenshots in a word document or an email.

"lso first example runs locally on any computer with docker or podman or whatever installed, second example exclusively runs on AWS."

So we have a multiple GB full vendor neutral system that runs on any provider with support for a Free Operating system, or even your own machine. And you are getting hang up because the process for deploying that vendor neutral system is itself not vendor neutral?

This is what I was writing about getting hung up on the 1% last mile. It's going to draw so much effort to convert that last mile into a fully compliant vendor neutral solution, for almost no benefit, I just proved that you can port it in 3 seconds, if we migrate to GCP I just change the first line and you are done.

Furthermore as soon as you want to make this solution 100% compliant with whatever metric (in this case vendor neutrality), you introduce more dependencies with more stuff to make vendor neutral. In a sense you are now locked in to Docker, shouldn't we make an abstraction layer so that we can run this thing with Docker or Podman indistinguishably?

Get your focus back on the actual product you are building instead of how nice 3 lines look.

[planb]

Really you seem to be the one who's trolling here, or you do not understand why people use containers because you don't have their use case.

[TZubiri]

There's several use cases to virtualization. You might be under the illusion that you use docker for the same use cases, but you will probably find 3 or 4 use cases if you talk with other users: Deterministic testing, automated deployments, external dependency installation (docker run psql).

Besides the semantic usecases of Docker which can be infinite, technically docker is a virtualization and isolation mechanism. So whatever you do with docker can also be done with type 1, 2 virtualization or even processes and users (hint that's what docker is actually built on). There's plenty of junior programmers that learn to docker run something to isolate it without learning how to isolate with basic user permissions.

So the use case isn't really relevant when I say that you can live without docker.

In general if you ever find yourself complaining about your free stuff, I recommend that you uninstall it to show yourself you don't need it. And then you can reconsider to come back to it again from a place of gratefulness instead of demanding neediness.

[orf]

> There's several use cases to virtualization

Containers are not virtualisation.

> So whatever you do with docker can also be done with type 1, 2 virtualization

This statement is redundant. Whatever you do with docker can also be done with a Turing machine built using magic the gathering[1].

> There's plenty of junior programmers…

And there are plenty of junior programmers who think containers = virtualisation :)

1. https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09828

[TZubiri]

>Containers are not virtualisation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docker_(software)

>Docker is a set of platform as a service (PaaS) products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers.[5]

https://lwn.net/Articles/179361/

>"Virtualization" is the act of making a set of processes believe that it has a dedicated system to itself.

>Full virtualization and paravirtualization are not the only approaches being taken, however. An alternative is lightweight virtualization, generally based on some sort of container concept.

https://people.freebsd.org/~bapt/pdfdocs/papers/jail.pdf

>To this end, we describe the newFreeBSD ‘‘Jail’’facility,which provides a strong partitioning solution, leveraging existing mechanisms, such as chroot(2), to what effectively amounts to a virtual machine environment.

> And there are plenty of junior programmers who think containers = virtualisation :)

At least we do agree on one thing, there is one and only one subpar engineer among us.

[bananapub]

what a profoundly useless comment. "why don't you do something else, unrelated, which doesn't solve any of the problems you have?" is absolutely the Ur-HN Reply.

[jaapz]

Yeah it sounds like something someone would say who hasn't actually used docker (or containerization at all) much but has decided it sucks anyway.

[TZubiri]

Started using it like 7 years ago.

Since virtualization has so many usecases, it's not possible to list all of the ways to do the thing without containerization (either with traditional virtualization or no virtualization at all), but be assured, you can do it, there's nothing special about containers, it's just another way to do things that you can choose not to use at all.

[thomasfedb]

The article is about DockerHub, not Docker.

Containers aren’t the only solution to every problem but they’re a decent hammer for a lot of nails.

[TZubiri]

One of the core arguments is that DockerHub is the default for Docker. The article shows that the URL for dockerhub is baked into Docker and is used when no registry is specified.

[arccy]

and who hosts that Debian image you're starting from....

[TZubiri]

AWS

[the-grump]

Yeah, no.

I'm not only using containers to deploy my VPSes.

Thank you for trying.

P.S. at least use something declarative and provider-agnostic like terraform.

[TZubiri]

What else are you using containers for?

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Testing things on my laptop and deploying services to my home lab. Both benefit enormously from the minimal overhead, fast deployment, and ease of completely removing a service once I'm done with it.

[TZubiri]

Ah yes, that was one of the main selling points of docker early on, fixing the "works on my machine".

The way I solve that problem is by working directly on testing/staging servers which have the same specs as production.

I almost never run stuff on my local machine, and if I do it's a well isolated piece of code whose IO signature I know exactly and I can mock external systems with ease.