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by x0x0 3999 days ago
they had 3 reasons:

one of which was just silly (kernel version -- are you living on that point release forever?)

one of which was valid (necessity to maintain method for distributing docker images), but probably dumb: you only get so many innovation points per company, and innovating on a problem docker just solves means you are supporting your in-house solution ad infinitum

and one of which definitely sounds painful (docker vs extant ansible playbooks)

2 comments

The 3.2 kernel they mention is the standard kernel of Ubuntu 12.04. I have some docker machines of the same vintage, and it's as simple as installing a backported kernel from the official repos.

This being said, I'm using docker for packaging/deployment of a nodejs app on those machines, and I hate it. I'm about to strip it out and go for .debs. Docker brings a lot of baggage with it, and requires major restructuring of some infrastructure parts. As they say in the article, the changes required to bring docker in just to do packaging are way too heavy. And Docker also sucks for rollbacks, to be honest - their tagging system is downright terrible.

My advice is not to use Docker in a production environment unless you can articulate the specific pain points it will solve for you.

Agreed on the rollback part.

It is easy to pick the silliness of the kernel reason, but Docker is moving fast right now. They are still getting the basic building blocks in place, and the Docker in two years will look nothing like today's.

We use Docker quite a bit today, but it's immature and it shows. With Composer I feel the basic functionality is finally in place it needs time to mature.

So I think it's quite wise to wait. You don't need to chase every new technology. If you have a product to ship, focus on that instead and use whatever tools are proven to work.

    sudo apt-get install linux-generic-lts-quantal