Selfhosted

Check out Nixos, this is like the next step of docker

Ah, and a side note: docker is not fully open source

I'll answer your question of why with your own frustration - bare metal is difficult. Every engineer uses a different language/framework/dependencies/whathaveyou and usually they'll conflict with others. Docker solves this be containing those apps in their own space. Their code, projects, dependencies are already installed and taken care of, you don't need to worry about it.

Take yourself out of homelab and put yourself into a sysadmin. Now instead of knowing how packages may conflict with others, or if updating this OS will break applications, you just need to know docker. If you know docker, you can run any docker app.

So, yes, volumes and environments are a bit difficult at first. But it's difficult because it is a standard. Every docker container is going to need a couple mounts, a couple variables, a port or two open, and if you're going crazy maybe a GPU. It doesn't matter if you're running 1 or 50 containers on a system, you aren't going to get conflicts.

As for the security concerns, they are indeed security concerns. Again imagine you're a sysadmin - you could direct developers that they can't use root, that they need to be built on OS's with the latest patches. But you're at home, so you're at the mercy of whoever built the image.

Now that being said, since you're at their mercy, their code isn't going to get much safer whether you run it bare-iron or containerized. So, do you want to spend hours for each app figuring out how to run it, or spend a few hours now to learn docker and then have it standardized?

Why docker?

Its all about companies re-creating and reconfiguring the way people develop software so everyone will be hostage of their platforms. We see this in everything now Docker/DockerHub/Kubernetes and GitHub actions were the first sign of this cancer.

We now have a generation of developers that doesn’t understand the basic of their tech stack, about networking, about DNS, about how to deploy a simple thing into a server that doesn’t use some Docker or isn’t a 3rd party cloud xyz deploy-from-github service.

oh but the underlying technologies aren’t proprietary

True, but this Docker hype invariably and inevitably leads people down a path that will then require some proprietary solution or dependency somewhere that is only required because the “new” technology itself alone doesn’t deliver as others did in the past. In this particular case is Docker Hub / Kubernetes BS and all the cloud garbage around it.

oh but there are alternatives like podman

It doesn’t really matter if there are truly open-source and open ecosystems of containerization technologies because in the end people/companies will pick the proprietary / closed option just because “it’s easier to use” or some other specific thing that will be good on the short term and very bad on the long term. This happened with CentOS vs Debian is currently unfolding with Docker vs LXC/RKT/Podman and will happen with Ubuntu vs Debian for all those who moved from CentOS to Ubuntu.

lots of mess in the system (mounts, fake networks, rules…)

Yes, a total mess of devices hard to audit, constant ram wasting and worse than all it isn't as easy change a docker image / develop things as it used to be.

I'll say that as someone who stopped using docker and went back to deploying from source in lxc containers: dockers is a great tool for the majority of people and that is exactly what it aims to be, easily reusable in as many different setups as possible.

On the flip side, yes it may happen that you would not benefit from docker for a reason or another. I don't, in my case docker only adds another layer over my already containerized setup and many of the services I deploy are already built from source in a CI/CD workflow and deployed through ansible.

I do have other issues with docker but those are usually less with the tool and more with how some project use docker as a mean to replace proper deployment documentations.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.

[Thread #423 for this sub, first seen 10th Jan 2024, 18:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

What makes it make sense in a work environment?

It looks great on a resume, even if there's a risk you'll land a job involving it.

My personal opinion is that Docker just makes things more difficult. Containers are fantastic, and I use plenty of them, but Docker is just one way to implement containers, and a bad one. I have a server that runs Proxmox; if I need to set up a new service, I just spin up a LXC and install what I need to. It gives all the advantages of a full Linux installation without taking up the resources of a full-fledged OS. With Docker, I would need a VM running the docker host, then I'd have to install my docker containers inside this host, then forward any ports or resources between the hypervisor, docker host, and docker container.

I just don't get the use-case for Docker. As far as I can tell, all it does is add another layer of complexity between the host machine and the container.