[ryandrake]

> Most companies (in the global, not SV sense) would be well served by an app that runs in a Docker container in a VPS somewhere and has PostgreSQL and maybe Garage, RabbitMQ and Redis if you wanna get fancy, behind Apache2/Nginx/Caddy.

That’s still too much complication. Most companies would be well served by a native .EXE file they could just run on their PC. How did we get to the point where applications by default came with all of this shit?

[direwolf20]

When I was in primary school, the librarian used a computer this way, and it worked fine. However, she had to back it up daily or weekly onto a stack of floppy disks, and if she wanted to serve the students from the other computer on the other side of the room, she had to restore the backup on there, and remember which computer had the latest data, and only use that one. When doing a stock–take (scanning every book on the shelves to identify lost books), she had to bring that specific computer around the room in a cart. Such inconveniences are not insurmountable, but they're nice to get rid of. You don't need to back up a cloud service and it's available everywhere, even on smaller devices like your phone.

There's an intermediate level of convenience. The school did have an IT staff (of one person) and a server and a network. It would be possible to run the library database locally in the school but remotely from the library terminals. It would then require the knowledge of the IT person to administer, but for the librarian it would be just as convenient as a cloud solution.

[badsectoracula]

I think the 'more than one user' alternative to a 'single EXE on a single computer' isn't the multilayered pie of things that KronisLV mentioned, but a PHP script[0] on an apache server[0] you access via a web browser. You don't even need a dedicated DB server as SQLite will do perfectly fine.

[0] or similarly easy to get running equivalent

[KronisLV]

> but a PHP script[0] on an apache server[0] you access via a web browser

I've seen plenty of those as well - nobody knows exactly how things are setup, sometimes dependencies are quite outdated and people are afraid to touch the cPanel config (or however it's setup). Not that you can't do good engineering with enough discipline, it's just that Docker (or most methods of containerization) limits the blast range when things inevitably go wrong and at least try to give you some reproducibility.

At the same time, I think that PHP can be delightfully simple and I do use Apache2 myself (mod_php was actually okay, but PHP-FPM also isn't insanely hard to setup), it's just that most of my software lives in little Docker containers with a common base and a set of common tools, so they're decoupled from the updates and config of the underlying OS. I've moved the containers (well data+images) across servers with no issues when needed and also resintalled OSes and spun everything right back up.

Kubernetes is where dragons be, though.

[danans]

> That’s still too much complication. Most companies would be well served by a native .EXE file they could just run on their PC

I doubt that.

As software has grown to solving simple personal computing problems (write a document, create a spreadsheet) to solving organizational problems (sharing and communication within and without the organization), it has necessarily spread beyond the .exe file and local storage.

That doesn't give a pass to overly complex applications doing a simple thing - that's a real issue - but to think most modern company problems could be solved with just a local executable program seems off.

[yetihehe]

It can be like that, but then IT and users complain about having to update this .exe on each computer when you add new functionality or fix some errors. When you solve all major pain points with a simple app, "updating the app" becomes top pain point, almost by definition.

[KronisLV]

> How did we get to the point where applications by default came with all of this shit?

Because when you give your clients instructions on how to setup the environment, they will ignore some of them and then they install OracleJDK while you have tested everything under OpenJDK and you have no idea why the application is performing so much worse in their environment: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/oracle-jdk-and-openjdk-compatib...

It's not always trivial to package your entire runtime environment unless you wanna push VM images (which is in many ways worse than Docker), so Docker is like the sweet spot for the real world that we live in - a bit more foolproof, the configuration can be ONE docker-compose.yml file, it lets you manage resource limits without having to think about cgroups, as well as storage and exposed ports, custom hosts records and all the other stuff the human factor in the process inevitably fucks up.

And in my experience, shipping a self-contained image that someone can just run with docker compose up is infinitely easier than trying to get a bunch of Ansible playbooks in place.

If your app can be packaged as an AppImage or Flatpak, or even a fully self contained .deb then great... unless someone also wants to run it on Windows or vice versa or any other environment that you didn't anticipate, or it has more dependencies than would be "normal" to include in a single bundle, in which case Docker still works at least somewhat.

Software packaging and dependency management sucks, unless we all want to move over to statically compiled executables (which I'm all for). Desktop GUI software is another can of worms entirely, too.