Docker, rant
To put it bluntly, y'all got suckered, *again*, particularly the "Docker Captains" who did volunteer marketing work for a for-profit corporation.
How often does it need to be repeated? Corporations are not your friend, corporations are not communities, and doing free work for them means you're getting exploited.
"Free" shit from corporations is never truly free. It only exists for as long as necessary to have you do free marketing and grow their company for them. A corporation will 100% leave you for dead once that's been accomplished and they no longer need you.
When will people finally learn from this, and the thousands of similar failures before it, and stop defending corporations or buying into their "free for open-source" marketing?
I would be a lot less salty about this if I didn't get an absurd amount of backlash from weirdly defensive nerds every time I tried to warn people against predatory marketing schemes. Y'all are *part of the problem*.
FOSS projects learn to organize non-commercial communal infrastructure challenge 2023 (impossible)
Ah yes, and of course there's already a couple Tech Dudes who now believe that this problem should be solved with a decentralized network (seemingly without understanding that availability is a thing)
Anything to avoid solving problems on a social level, I guess
@joepie91 obviously we must put containers on a blockchain /s
@shine This one seemed to be of the IPFS-bro variation
@joepie91 bittorrent web seeds are a thing, the image publisher can maintain an authoritative source while also allowing arbitrary mirrors to share bandwidth
@lunch I am aware. This does not solve the problem occurring here.
@joepie91 sorry but why doesn't it?
@lunch Two reasons:
- The problem here is centralized namespace control, not centralized file serving
- BitTorrent-style P2P systems have an effective availability of 0, and 1 + 0 is still 1; adding unreliable peers does not actually increase the (semi-)guaranteed availability you have
@joepie91 the first two issues go hand in hand, whoever serves files gets to administer namespaces gets to control distribution
as for availability: bittorrent works *really* well for distributing stuff despite not giving any guarantees, if docker-like things had a larger culture of running local mirrors (which wouldn't be hardl I would expect this to be a nonissue and make the burden of publishing popular images marginal, especially if we bring in rss feeds for publishing updates
re: Docker, rant
@joepie91 what has Docker done now?
re: Docker, rant
@freemanovec They're deleting essentially all free organizations (and their images) from the registry in a month or so, unless they pay up
re: Docker, rant
@joepie91 geez.. That should accelerate my switch to quay xD Hecking Docker
re: Docker, rant
@freemanovec @joepie91 Quay is RedHat aka IBM operating on basically the same model, so you can copy paste the above thread in a few years with 's/docker/quay/g'
re: Docker, rant
@rune @pixie.town fair enough, but what are some viable alternatives for a public registry that you don't have to host yourself? GCR? :D
re: Docker, rant
@freemanovec All the registries are probably fine if you pay for them. It's not like Docker is deleting stuff for paying customers.
If you don't want to pay for them you'll have to host them yourself or live with going through this every few years when the VC funds run out.
re: Docker, rant
@joepie91 @freemanovec only the private images, not? I understood that public images on the hub are fine.
re: Docker, rant
@arjen @freemanovec My understanding from what I've read so far, is that all images are affected. But the exact details have changed at least once already, so who knows really
re: Docker, rant
@freemanovec @joepie91 they are shutting down the free tier of Docker Hub
re: Docker, rant
@joepie91 Pretty much, why I Self-Host these days
re: Docker, rant
@joepie91@social.pixie.town huh what happened
re: Docker, rant
@joepie91 I have worked very closely with Docker as a technology for a long time and can reliably say, as someone with deep knowledge of the system and containerization in general, that it's a shitty implementation full of architectural shortcuts that were made *precisely* to get to this point of trying to bleed money out of people.
Anyone who attacks you for these criticisms is not only completely naive of the motivations of private tech companies who boast their open source credentials, but is also going to have a hard time arguing that it's even a *good* containerizer on Linux, let alone the best one.
re: Docker, rant
@grimmware @joepie91 Was LXD supposed to be the answer to this? Or podman?
re: Docker, rant
@cousinofjah @joepie91 I wouldn’t go as far as to say that anything is “supposed” to be the answer, especially given that suitability really depends on your use case. Podman is certainly the better drop-in replacement that I’ve tried that actually has a feature set that gives a lot of access to the underlying namespace technologies, but there’s also a certain degree to which Docker has dictated the direction that a lot of these containerizers have grown in which I can’t help but feel has caused some of the kernel technologies to lag behind.
Personally I kinda feel that if the Linux kernel had copied the upstream Plan 9 inspiration and made a filesystem API for everything then it would all just be mount namespaces and thus the containerizer would be a significantly thinner piece of glue code but 🤷
Docker, rant
@joepie91 I am quite surprised by this even from the "It's an evil corporate" perspective tbh. Docker is losing its relevance a lot lately, in competition with Podman and other techmologies. Even their paid and closed Docker Machine is easily countered by completely OSS Podman Machine.
This really sounds like they are in troubles.
Docker, rant
@joepie91 What even happened with docker? I don't use containers, frankly I'm too much of a novice in that area to care about them, and Googling stuff about it gives me articles from years ago.
Docker, rant
Most cloud platforms (think GCP & Azure) offer it at least and some self-hostable registry options do exist, but most are geared more towards dealing with draconian security practices (possibly for good reason) and/or not wanting public code (not relevant for the discussion).
Docker, rant
Poorly made images consume pointless amounts of disk space and fetching them takes up a lot of bandwidth, both of which tend to scale... poorly.
With the sole exception of some Ruby nonsense I didn't want to waste time building massive images for, most of my private (non-work, non-profit) docker use has deliberately avoided dockerhub and it's ilk because it's just not worthwhile.
re: Docker, rant
@glitch The primary concern that people have in this case seems to not be the image hosting, but rather that lots of documentation and scripts for FOSS projects refer to pulling images from their registry, and those will all break
re: Docker, rant
The only thing dockerhub really provided was convenience wrt image hosting (which is a big convenience and it still sucks that they did it this way).
Docker, rant
@joepie91 completely agree, Docker tooling continued vaunted place in critical infrastructure and new projects while actually free alternatives exist infuriates me
re: Docker, rant
I particularly "love" how people write angrily about Docker's changes and then... suggest moving to *another* free service from a for-profit corporation
I can see no problem with this whatsoever