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Comment by raesene9 | Hacker News Reader

Linux I could understand but not MacOS. Of the three major desktop platforms, it's the only one without native containerization support...

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I think this is because Apple has no ambitions to make MacOS a dominant server operating system for internet based services.

In fact, I am not fond of the rather popular trend to brew ported versions of tools from Linux into MacOS to develop applications that will actually be deployed on Linux, so I am glad containerisation mitigates some of this problem and that MacOS makes you do it in a VM running Linux. Linux, being a Unix-like operating system is an internet server operating first, the most dominant one too, and a desktop operating system second. However, Linux distributions for servers and desktops are designed and managed very differently, that's why things like Docker was invented to reduce the issues with these differences.

Windows, on the other hand, is a desktop operating first, office productivity tools server second but they have also attempted to make their operating system dominant for all other servers and devices at the exclusion of everything else. They have not really succeeded at this, and containerisation and the cloud has made it even harder, hence why they have to both try to wedge Docker into Windows as a tick box exercise but also try to make it appear to work natively.

I'm not sure I'd agree with the characterization that Windows container support is a "tick box" excercise. I've followed the efforts of the team working on it, and it seems to me like they've put in a lot of work over a number of years to make this work in a Windows environment.

So what is missing ?

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor

https://developer.apple.com/app-sandboxing/

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/authoriza...

Not really missing anything, it's just that on macOS you actually need a vm to run docker. Docker for mac uses HyperKit VM and starts docker containers inside it.

It's mostly the same on windows (you needed hyper-v or virtualbox to run docker) but they are making efforts to run containers natively. Not sure how far they got with that.

In the end if you want the best performance with minimum resource usage you need a Linux OS

To clarify, my understanding is that on Windows you will always need a VM to run Linux containers, but there will be (is?) native Windows containers.

The dream is that maybe one day WSL will fully support Linux containers without a vm, but I will be amazed if they can pull that off.

Well, if you think about it, they already have containers on Windows - the WSL is effectively a container for each distro install.

Emulating Linux-level container APIs is also possible in principle.

It isn't really containerized, the same way Wine on Linux isn't. There is no isolation.

I have yet to bother with WSL as I am perfectly fine with Windows standard tooling, but it is built on top of Drawbridge, so it certainly has isolation in place.

Yep there is experimental support for native windows containers. (Not sure it it's still experimental as things move really fast in this space)

As I remember you couldn't have windows and linux containers running at the same time so you needed to flip a switch in the docker config to chose one.

I general I'm a linux guy but it would be really cool if they can get to a point in which you can run both windows and linux containers at the same time.

You can get Windows containers without VMs on Windows server 2016.

the WSL with Linux containers apparently does work with the latest insider builds...

There's a support for Windows containers in Docker, but it's probably not useful for majority of users, because most of docker images are based on Linux, so you'll need to run Linux VM for practical usage. I think, WSL might make it possible to run Linux-based images natively, but I didn't hear about it yet.

Windows native containers are running on top of Hyper-V.

Windows server containers are not necessarily run inside hyper-v: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowsconta...

My bad. Looks like they've implemented Linux namespaces from scratch (described nicely here [0])

[0] http://www.solidalm.com/2017/03/06/deep-dive-into-windows-se...

The Linux containers on windows in WSL, I've heard, works in the latest insider builds to at least some degree, but haven't tried it to confirm.

There are a reasonable number of Windows container images on Docker hub, although nothing like the volume of linux ones.

Windows containers work on Windows server 2016 with Job object based isolation (No VM needed). They also support Windows and Linux containers (via LCoW) using hyper-v VMs.

That's a bit surprising considering how many web developers use osx & docker

It has nothing to do with popularity; a Linux container needs a Linux kernel. (Similarly if you run Windows containers, you'll need a VM on Linux) (if there was ever a reason for MacOS containers, then it'd probably be native)

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