Thoughts on Docker

February 7, 2015

I came across this article on Docker. While I’ve never actually used Docker, I’m inclined to believe it, as every time I’ve thought about using it, either vanilla LXC with (or without) some other combination of technologies has seemed to fit the bill better.

The points the author brings up about Dockerfiles and caching/layers makes a lot of sense to me. Personally, I’d prefer to stick with Ansible/Salt instead of using this custom configuration format that tries to auto-determine if arbitrary shell commands are stateful or not. That seems ludicrous to me.

To give credit where credit is due, Dockerfiles are almost undoubtedly faster for certain operations, but I don’t know if that’s worth the added development overhead. Additionally, while I’m sure there’s value in immutable deployments, I’m not totally sold on Docker’s implementation.

Here’s the Hacker News comments on the article.