Docker is amazing for forcing the machines not to be pets, seriously, a racked sever is just another K3 or K8 node (or whatever) and doesn't get the choice or ability of being petted. It's so nice. You could maybe of said the same about vm's but not really, the VM just became the pet, OK you could at least image/snapshot it but it's not the same.
It’s interesting everyone having different experiences and those experiences drive what they do.
I would never dream of running Docker in production. It seems so overly complicated. Also, since day one, I could never understand using a public registry for mission critical stuff. When I was learning Docker, I would unplug the network cable so I wouldn’t accidentally push my container online somewhere with all my data.
I totally get the concept at scale. I also get the concept of just shipping an application in a container. I also get the concept of self-hosting of just give me the container so I don’t have to think about how it all works.
However, the complexity of building the container, cleanup, deleting entries, environment variables, no SSH availability, even on Railway in the beginning, ambiguous where your container needs to be to be to even get it somewhere. Public registry or private registry.
Certainly most of it is my lack of knowledge of not sticking with it.
Just give me a VM and some firewall rules. Cloning VMs can be automated in so many different ways.
/rant
I agree with you, but I also don’t do webdev. Docker seems neat, I’ve dabbled just to understand the stack and how it works. Not much of a container person I realized. Closest I get is spinning out yocto images and flashing them to hardware. Same image every time with updated versions of software. So maybe kind of like docker in the abstract sense, I suppose.
I’m mid-way through my career at this point and I’m hoping to skip the web/cloud bit, I just don’t enjoy it as much as I do hw/sw integrations.
I've found docker is as of a monstrous pet.
Docker is a monster that you have to treat as a pet. You've still got to pet it through stages of updating, monitoring, snapshots and networking. When the internal system breaks it's no different to a server collapsing.
Snapshots are a haircut for the monster, useful but can make things worse.
Not in my experience, super easy to setup a K3s cluster in a single rack. Certainly less hassle than VMWare was or XEN ever was.
I find the same with Systemd and Docker.
Some can tame the beast, for me it's always a fight until one of us holds down the power button.