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From the reddit thread 2 days ago:

> The whole point of Docker containers is that they're very efficient with their resource and space usage. If you have 15 redundant frameworks pre-loaded in a container, of which you use at most 3, you're using Docker wrong.




Well, I'd say the point of Docker is to make distributing and running something easy, reliable, and reasonably safe. Which is what is happening here.

It is true that Docker is more space efficient than setting up whole VMs for each app. But it's a lot less space efficient than installing everything on a big server. If you are running, say, a bunch of Python apps, the lowest-space approach is making sure they all use the same set of libraries, modules, and other required resources. But harmonizing those versions is a pain in the ass, so Docker lets you easily use multiple copies of python, overlapping libraries, python packages, etc.

It's true that if you were deploying this in production, you'd want to trim this back. But this is explicitly a "research environment".


Shall we talk about Deepo, not docker?

Absolutely loading loads of packages in a container is never a good idea for production. But Deepo is not for production, it is a playground. It is a thing which help people to explore and learn these packages without a hassle and the worry for messing up their system.

Indeed, having played around dl-docker, I really appreciate the author of Deepo. It seems like to be more updated, more well-covered, and more promising to me.


It's also much easier to make "sure they all use the same set of libraries, modules, and other required resources" with smaller teams.

The larger you get, the higher the chance that dependency hell will cripple the velocity of a project.

Docker helps a ton in these types of scenarios.


> Well, I'd say the point of Docker is to make distributing and running something easy, reliable, and reasonably safe. Which is what is happening here.

No, that's http://flatpak.org/


you may not think that this is what containers are for. But it's certainly how people use them, and it's echoed on https://www.docker.com/what-container


That seems targeted at applications, not development, and it's got much less momentum behind it.


Watch it turn into a Docker rival soon enough...


"Don't use it that way! That's not how it was intended."

Good to see the hacker spirit is alive and well here.


For production - 100% agree. For playing with code - not at all.


I agree with this sentiment. That said, someone is totally going to deploy this.


That's immediately where I saw the value of this as well.


As someone who has wasted hours setting up these various tools on an EC2 instance (just to play around with cool projects and experiment) this is a gorgeous constellation of utility.


I thought the point of Docker was to compartmentalize software setups to make them portable? Who are you to say someone is using it "wrong" if people find the utility in it?


I think it's ok to have them all set up but not running.

We have a 9GB+ docker image that we create containers from some 10k times per day for our users in production.


Why?

Would be interesting to hear about what your use case is, and how it works for you.


To offer online compiler for 20+ languages. We create a temporary container for each user on our servers.

Here is one of our high-traffic product: https://codepad.remoteinterview.io/

It's used by interviewers, students, teachers who need a quick place to practice and pair-program.


It feels more and more like containers in general is being used as a band-aid over various underlying issues concerning inter-dependencies and conflicts between various projects within the Linux ecosystem.

Why take the effort to get the kids to play nice with each other when you can lock each of them in their own room?


If it works and it's useful who cares


For multiple layers in a Dockerfile use overlayfs2 and not aufs. You will suffer from slow io


I've been having issues with slow IO on some of my containers, and I'm using AUFS. What is the cause of the slowdown with AUFS? Why do they not use Overlay2 as default if AUFS has such a major issue?


AUFS is the only fs that was broadly distributed until recently. Now, it's been removed in the latest linux distributions because it's too buggy and unstable.

Overlay was started and quickly abandoned. Only to be replaced by overlay2 that is work in progress and not wildly available yet.

This article contains a bit of history on Docker filesystems: https://thehftguy.com/2016/11/01/docker-in-production-an-his...




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