Comment by knz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by knz | Hacker News Reader

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> The guys at my work made the switch to containers months ago and we've yet to realize any gains from them,

> Development is more complicated and slower, everyone is on macs so docker runs like shit

That's probably related to the complexities of your specific architecture, applications, and infrastructure.

We are mostly a python shop and containers were a game changer (we've been using Docker since it was a beta product). The consistency between development/deployment and the ease of deployments made it possible to rapidly iterate in a way that wasn't possible in the past (deployments used to be a whole day affair and now we deploy multiple times a day).

Likewise with OSX development - the isolation of the container makes it far easier to manage dependencies and have a consistent experience with QA and production. I've also used it for horizontally scaling geospatial analysis - commands like "docker service scale gis=500" make it trivial to run complex analysis across multiple hosts compared to the alternatives.

Docker + Python API's + HTML/JS front ends has been nothing but smooth sailing for the past few years.

To play devil’s advocate, if you already have a build process with repeatability and a close corellation to production, containers may seem like robbing Peter to pay Paul.

For one thing people almost always end up reworking their layers to go from least to most frequent changes for speed, but that often confuses the issue of logical units of work within the setup code.

And if you’re using npm or gem in a container, on Mac, You are going to experience some strong, negative feelings.

I don't disagree. As I said it's "probably related to the complexities of your specific architecture, applications, and infrastructure."

Use what works for your environment and team.

I use vagrant with the same os as the server for whatever project I'm working on. What's the advantage of docker over this?

> What's the advantage of docker over this?

To be honest, I don't know enough about vagrant to fully answer this.

I'm curious if there are any advantages with vagrant over Docker?

The first, obvious thing you would notice is performance. A docker container typically starts up in a fraction of a second (whatever process is running inside it might take a few seconds more) while a vagrant VM has to go through a whole boot up process. Docker has a slight overhead on disk I/O, but it's still far better than a typical vagrant setup. A docker container has very little memory overhead beyond what the process is using vs vagrant requiring you to allocate a fixed amount per VM. It's completely reasonable to run dozens of containers simultaneously on a laptop all completely isolated. Doing the same with vagrant would require an enormous amount of memory.

The bigger advantage is the switch in mindset that is much harder to explain or quantify.

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