Comment on Ditching Docker for Local Development

astral_avocado@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• LGUG2Z@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Hi!

  First I’d like to clarify that I’m not “anti-container/Docker”. 😅

  There is a lot of discussion on this article (with my comments!) going on over at Tildes. I don’t wanna copy-paste everything from there, but I’ll share the first main response I gave to someone who had very similar feedback to kick-start some discussion on those points here as well:

  Some high level points on the “why”:

  • Reproducibility: Docker builds are not reproducible, and especially in a company with more than a handful of developers, it’s nice not to have to worry about a docker build command in the on-boarding docs failing inexplicably (from the POV of the regular joe developer) from one day to the next

  • Cost: Docker licenses for most companies now cost $9/user/month (minimum of 5 seats required) - this is very steep for something that doesn’t guarantee reproducibility and has poor performance to boot (see below)

  • Performance: Docker performance on macOS (and Windows), especially storage mount performance remains poor; this is even more acutely felt when working with languages like Node where the dependencies are file-count heavy. Sure, you could just issue everyone Linux laptops, but these days hiring is hard enough without shooting yourself in the foot by not providing a recent MBP to new devs by default

  I think it’s also worth drawing a line between containers as a local development tool and containers as a deployment artifact, as the above points don’t really apply to the latter.

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  • Hexarei@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    If your dev documentation includes your devs running docker build, you’re doing docker wrong.

    The whole point is that you can build a working container image and then ship it to a registry (including private registries) so that your other developers/users/etc don’t have to build them and can just run the existing image.

    Then for development, you simply use a bind mount to ensure your local copy of the code is available in the container instead of the copy the container was built with.

    That doesn’t solve the performance issues on Windows and Mac, but it does prevent the “my environment is broke” issues that docker is designed to solve

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    • LGUG2Z@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The whole point is that you can build a working container image and then ship it to a registry (including private registries) so that your other developers/users/etc don’t have to build them and can just run the existing image.

      Agreed, we still do this in the areas where we use Docker at day job.

      I think the mileage with this approach can vary depending on the languages in use and the velocity of feature iteration (ie. if the company is still tweaking product-market fit, pivoting to a new vertical, etc.).

      I’ve lost count of the number of times where a team decides they need to npm install something with a heavy node-gyp step to build native modules which require yet another obscure system dependency that is not in the base layer. 😅

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  • firelizzard@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Cost: Docker licenses for most companies now cost $9/user/month

    Are you talking about Docker Desktop and/or Docker Hub? Because plain old docker is free and open source, unless I missed something bug. Personally I’ve never had much use for Docker Desktop and I use GitLab so I have no reason to use Docker Hub.

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    • LGUG2Z@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I believe this is the Docker Desktop license pricing.

      On an individual scale and even some smaller startup scales, things are a little bit different (you qualify for the free tier, everyone you work with is able to debug off-the-beaten-path Docker errors, knowledge about fixes is quick and easy to disseminate, etc.), but the context of this article and the thread on Mastodon that spawned it was a “unicorn” company with an engineering org comprised of hundreds of developers.

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      • firelizzard@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        My point is that Docker Desktop is entirely optional. On Linux you can run Docker Engine natively, on Windows you can run it in WSL, and on macOS you can run it in a VM with Docker Engine, or via something like hyperkit and minikube. And Docker Engine (and the CLI) is FOSS.

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  • CodeBlooded@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Docker builds are not reproducible

    What makes you say that?

    My team relies on Docker because it is reproducible…

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    • LGUG2Z@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Highly recommended viewing if you’d like to learn more about the limits of reproducibility in the Docker ecosystem.

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      • CodeBlooded@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I’m going to give it a watch. Thanks for sharing!

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    • uthredii@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You might be interested in this article that compares nix and docker. It explains why docker builds are not considered reproducible:

      For example, a Dockerfile will run something like apt-get-update as one of the first steps. Resources are accessible over the network at build time, and these resources can change between docker build commands. There is no notion of immutability when it comes to source.

      and why nix builds are a lot of the time:

      Builds can be fully reproducible. Resources are only available over the network if a checksum is provided to identify what the resource is. All of a package’s build time dependencies can be captured through a Nix expression, so the same steps and inputs (down to libc, gcc, etc.) can be repeated.

      Containerization has other advantages though (security) and you can actually use nix’s reproducible builds in combination with (docker) containers.

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      • nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        That seems like an argument for maintaining a frozen repo of packages, not against containers. You can only have a truly fully-reproducible build environment if you setup your toolchain to keep copies of every piece of external software so that you can do hermetic builds.

        I think this is a misguided way to workaround proper toolchain setup. Nix is pretty cool though.

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      • CodeBlooded@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I’ll certainly give this a read!

        Are you saying that nix will cache all the dependencies within itself/its “container,” or whatever its container replacement would be called?

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  • astral_avocado@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Appreciate the in-depth response! I’ve always been interested in Nix but I’m scared of change lol. And I’m a single systems administrator on a team of mostly non-technicals so large changes like that are … less necessary. Plus you know, mostly dealing with enterprise software on windows unfortunately. One of these days.

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  • Coehl@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    For this reason, we’re slowly integrating WSL2 usage onto the dev windows machines. I’m not saying that this refutes your last point, but it’s another thing to consider. This has, however, resulted in me learning to architect pretty gonzo level bash scripts when I’m accustomed to… more formal development. Lol.

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    • LGUG2Z@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      NixOS on WSL2 is actually my development environment of choice these days! (With my tiling window manager komorebi, of course! 😀)

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      • Coehl@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Yep. That’s my personal open source project setup. I love nixos. It’s everything I like about dockerfile and a daily driver all rolled into one.

        Tall ask for the workplace with a bunch of windows only folks, though, unfortunately.

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  • Dasnap@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Docker performance on macOS (and Windows), especially storage mount performance remains poor

    I remember when I first got a work Macbook and was confused why I had to install some ‘Docker Desktop’ crap.

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• CodeBlooded@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Docker is like, my favorite utility tool, for both deployment AND development (my replacement for Python virtual environments). I wanted to hear more of why I shouldn’t use it also.

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  • astral_avocado@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Right? If it’s about ease of insight into containers for debugging and troubleshooting, I can kinda see that. Although I’m so used to working with containers it isn’t a barrier really to me anymore.

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    • sip@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      yup. it’s a breeze especially for interpreted langs. mount the source code, expose the ports and voila. need a db?

        image: postgres
      

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• huantian@fosstodon.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  @astral_avocado @LGUG2Z That definitely would’ve been helpful for readers new to the Nix scene, but I don’t think that’s the purpose of this article. It’s written as more of an example of a way to move to Nix, rather than an opinion piece on why you should move away from Docker.

  I won’t try to argue why you should switch. However, I would recommend you look into the subject more, Docker is a great tool, but Nix is on a diffeeent level 🙃

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