Container Curse and Update on Incus
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Computers Are Bad ☛ the curse of docker
I'm heading to Las Vegas for re:invent soon, perhaps the most boring type of industry extravaganza there could be. In that spirit, I thought I would write something quick and oddly professional: I'm going to complain about Docker.
Packaging software is one of those fundamental problems in system administration. It's so important, so influential on the way a system is used, that package managers are often the main identity of operating systems. Consider Windows: the operating system's most alarming defect in the eyes of many "Linux people" is its lack of package management, despite Microsoft's numerous attempts to introduce the concept. Well, perhaps more likely, because of the number of those attempts. And still, in the GNU/Linux world, distributions are differentiated primarily by their approach to managing software repositories. I don't just mean the difference between dpkg and rpm, but rather more fundamental decisions, like opinionated vs. upstream configuration and stable repositories vs. a rolling release. RHEL and Arch share the vast majority of their implementation and yet have very different vibes.
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What really irritates me these days is not really the use of Docker images in DevOps environments that are, to some extent, centrally planned and managed. The problem is the use of Docker as a lowest common denominator, or perhaps more accurately lowest common effort, approach to distributing software to end users. When I see open-source, server-side software offered to me as a Docker image or--even worse---Docker Compose stack, my gut reaction is irritation. These sorts of things usually take longer to get working than equivalent software distributed as a conventional Linux package or to be built from source.
But wait, how does that happen? Isn't Docker supposed to make everything completely self-contained? Let's consider the common problems, something that I will call my Taxonomy of Docker Gone Bad.
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Stéphane Graber: Adding a web UI to the Incus demo service
Introduction
For anyone who hasn’t seen it before, you can try the Incus container and virtual machine manager online by just heading to our website and starting a demo session.
This gets you a dedicated VM on an Incus cluster with a bunch of resources and with a 30min time limit so you can either poke around for yourself or go through our guided showcase.
Now as neat as this is, it’s nothing new and we’ve been offering this for quite a while.