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by em-bee 288 days ago
i used "broken" generously. it basically means that for example for multiple php based services, we had to upgrade them all at once, which lead to a large downtime until everything was up and running again. services in containers meant that we could deal with them one at a time and dramatically reduce the downtime and complexity of the upgrade process.
2 comments
curt15 288 days ago
Would there still have been a problem if you were able to install multiple php versions side-by-side? HPC systems also have to manage multiple combinations of toolchains and environments and they typically use Modules[1] for that.

[1] https://hpc-wiki.info/hpc/Modules

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em-bee 288 days ago
probably not, but it wasn't just php, and also one of the goals was the ability to scale up. and so having each service in its own container meant that we could move them to different machines and add more machines as needed.
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johnisgood 288 days ago
Oh, I see what you mean now, okay, that makes sense.

I would use containers too, in such cases.

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