JBjbergknoff·Sep 12, 2019
It's interesting to see the complaint about containers starting too slowly. I haven't seen much discussion about it before this article and this comment thread, but it's one of my biggest pain points with Docker. I know we can save some time by skipping some namespaces (e.g. `--net host`) but I've still never been able to get satisfyingly fast container execution in that way. (e.g. `time echo` -> 0.000s, `time docker run --rm alpine echo` -> 1.3s; come to think of it, this is even slower than it used to be)
Still, Docker is the best method that I've seen for distributing software, especially cross-platform. Not just for shipping a containerized web app to production, but also running dev tools (e.g. linters, compilers) and other desktop and CLI applications. I know some people run lots of stuff in containers (https://github.com/jessfraz/d
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ockerfiles, probably the most prolific), but I think this is a largely underappreciated facet of Docker.
My team at work is heavily Mac while I'm on Linux. The dev workflows are identical on my machine, on their machines, and in Jenkins. Nobody has to have a snowflake setup, installing this or that version of Python, we're all just `docker run`ning the same image. It's great.
Unfortunately, Docker for Mac's IO performance is abysmal. If past performance is any indication of future results, that's never going to change. I'm constantly on the lookout for other ways to share tools cross-platform that don't involve Docker. Things like podman and binctr are exciting, and I've played with them, but I don't see them filling this niche.