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by jacquesm 4390 days ago
Hm. We'll see about that. I can see a whole pile of potential issues here with 'breaking out of the docker' on par with escaping from the sandbox and breaking the chroot jail, which I see this as a luxury version of.

Of course you could try to escalate from a VM to the host (see cloudburst) but that's a rarity.

Docker seems to be less well protected against that sort of thing, but I'm nowhere near qualified to make that evaluation so I'll stick to 'seems' for now. It looks like the jump is a smaller one than from a VM.

2 comments

Fair usage of resources and security isolation are two VERY different problems. Containers can be VERY good at resource isolation. Security has not really been figured out yet.
This isn't really a "we'll see" issue. It is a fact that containers do resource isolation. :P The security issues are orthogonal.
Containers don't isolate very well. One thing that is easy to do is to make the system do disk output on your behalf just by making lots of dirty pages, or make the system use lots of memory on your behalf due to network activity. And of course there are the usual problems that you already have with VMs such as poor cache occupancy.

Shared hosting of random antagonistic processes is something that many developers are not quite ready to embrace. If you are willing to run your service with poor isolation and questionable security then containers are just the thing. You'll definitely spend less money if you can serve in such an environment.

I beg to differ. If you manage to break out of a container then all the resources of the machine are at your disposal.

So they're orthogonal only as long as the security assumptions hold.