Recently I was reading a discussion that docker solves a linux problem, and therefore isn’t needed in the BSD projects. But then some other people disagreed. If there was only one linux distribution, say debian, do you think docker would be needed? This is not a rhetorical question, I’m genuinely wondering what you think.
Kinda. I think it’s definitely true that docker is used as a distro-agnostic package manager for services, and if we only had one distro we might not need that.
It should be noted that projects like cosmo attempt to make things portable to and across BSD’s as well as Linux’s, so people definitely want distro agnostic packages (or a package manager), even on the BSD operating systems.
However, on the other end, docker is also powerful because it (and tools that use docker containers, like kubernetes), orchestrate services and allow people to bring them up very, very quickly. Like, to bring up a service called pairdrop, I just take this file:
and type docker-compose up -d. And it’s really quick, and arguably only possible due to the way containers are isolated and it’s easy to create and destroy them. There exist solutions for automation and scripting like ansible, but they just aren’t as good as the container solutions for automatically putting services up.
Docker is the gnu version of windows users asking “where can I download an exe that just does what I want” (but with a dramatic teenage flair).
This should be the wikipedia summary.
Thanks. They get real pissy in the self hosted communities when I point this out.
Recently I was reading a discussion that docker solves a linux problem, and therefore isn’t needed in the BSD projects. But then some other people disagreed. If there was only one linux distribution, say debian, do you think docker would be needed? This is not a rhetorical question, I’m genuinely wondering what you think.
Kinda. I think it’s definitely true that docker is used as a distro-agnostic package manager for services, and if we only had one distro we might not need that.
It should be noted that projects like cosmo attempt to make things portable to and across BSD’s as well as Linux’s, so people definitely want distro agnostic packages (or a package manager), even on the BSD operating systems.
However, on the other end, docker is also powerful because it (and tools that use docker containers, like kubernetes), orchestrate services and allow people to bring them up very, very quickly. Like, to bring up a service called pairdrop, I just take this file:
--- services: pairdrop: image: lscr.io/linuxserver/pairdrop:latest container_name: pairdrop environment: - PUID=1000 - PGID=1000 - TZ=Etc/UTC - RATE_LIMIT=false #optional - WS_FALLBACK=false #optional - RTC_CONFIG= #optional - DEBUG_MODE=false #optional ports: - 3000:3000 restart: unless-stoppedand type
docker-compose up -d. And it’s really quick, and arguably only possible due to the way containers are isolated and it’s easy to create and destroy them. There exist solutions for automation and scripting like ansible, but they just aren’t as good as the container solutions for automatically putting services up.