Show HN: Dockerfiler: declarative management of images built from Dockerfiles

Show HN: Dockerfiler: declarative management of images built from Dockerfiles(github.com)

35 points by jbergknoff 5 years ago | 49 comments

jbergknoff 5 years ago |

Hi, I'm the author. Thanks for taking a look. This is basically a tool to help manage a "Dockerfile" repo (along the lines of https://github.com/jessfraz/dockerfiles), where you build any tools you want into images that you control. This can be really useful for personal use or within a company.

Why build tools into Docker images? Love it or hate it, there are many senses in which Docker is currently the best medium that we have for distributing and running dev tools. Here's an article making that argument: https://jonathan.bergknoff.com/journal/run-more-stuff-in-doc....

tuananh 5 years ago | |

this description is a lot clearer to me than the one from readme :)

jbergknoff 5 years ago | | |

Thanks for that feedback! I'll update the readme.

fermienrico 5 years ago |

We've made all this so complicated. Instead of the beautiful simplicity based on UNIX philosophy (arguably), modern devops feels like a mishmash of ideas plopped together, tied with a bunch of yaml tape and god forbid if you ever want to look inside the stack of mess. Containerization is a great idea but flawed in its interface.

I like what Jim Keller (chip architect) says about complexity - that we need to throw away everything and start from scratch to which the interviewer asks, how often? Jim responds that currently chip architectures are re-done every 10 years but it should be more like every 5 years[1].

Just like any evolutionary process, there comes a point of diminishing returns because mistakes made cannot be corrected due to many other things that get piled up on top of it. So, it is difficult to track back. What happens is more shit gets piled up on top just to patch up old mistakes. Like our laryngeal nerve that loops around from the brain, all the way to the cervical area and goes back to the voicebox[2]. It is even more evident in a Giraffe. A good architect wouldn't design anatomy like this. The reason why it is the way it is, is because evolution has no hindsight and marginal cost of undoing the nerve is higher than just slightly increasing the length of the nerve. This is what we do in software. A good architect wouldn't design software like this. Sorry for the diversion, but I just feel so much pain with Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform and a whole load of AWS complexity. Holyshit.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CSeY10zbqo

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve#/med...

mixologic 5 years ago | |

Sure it seems complex, but we're solving insanely complex problems that didnt even remotely exist during the halcyon days of "beautiful simplicity" of the ol' Unix philosophy. That philosophy was borne out of tools to process text files. It's closest proxy in the ops world might be microservices, but if you compare the amount of labor it used to take to set up a datacenter in even something so recent at the first dotcom era, its insane what we can accomplish with a cloudformation yaml file or a terraform configuration file in a similar amount of time. The reproducability, the change management, all of it is light years better than it used to be. Every one of these 'yaml messes' all evolved out of drastically shittier shellscripts, duct tape, hope, and weekend pagers blowing up.

It might seem complex, and obtuse, but its turtles all the way down, and everything all the way back to to the original von Neumann architecture could definitely be looked at again and redesigned, but otoh, we're still doing weird shit like dividing our day into 24 hours and 60 minutes and 60 seconds for no other reason than 'its always been that way' and if we had a chance to actually design a sensible time system we could eliminate a lot of the complexity that has piled up on top of that system.

But yeah, no way would I ever want to go back to the way things were before all these layers existed.

pydry 5 years ago | | |

There were just as many tools that existed during those "halcyon" days that didn't adhere to the UNIX philosophy. They just didn't tend to survive.

The one thing that hasn't changed is commercial (& ego) pressure to make the "one tool to rule them all", which has been pretty much immutable throughout the years, while on the other hand there is the reality of trying to string all of these things together.

Small, self contained tools with good APIs have persisted and will stand the test of time while the monoliths always die eventually (maybe with the exception of excel, which has really managed to cling on).

I don't think kubernetes or docker really have a bright future because they both have an ambition to be "the one tool to rule them all" and they simply can't.

aasasd 5 years ago | |

> Instead of the beautiful simplicity based on UNIX philosophy, modern devops feels like a mishmash of ideas plopped together, tied with a bunch of yaml tape

So... it's simpler tools tied together? Are you arguing that simple tools must instead stay apart? Is the developer supposed to build their thing invoking each basic tool one-by-one? Maybe makefiles and shell scripts should also be verboten, then?

aasasd 5 years ago | | |

> we need to throw away everything and start from scratch

Wait a minute, this part is even funnier. So Docker allows you to build your quasi-VMs using all those Unix tools, by talking to Linux that's been put inside your Linux. But apparently this is not what you meant by ‘Unix philosophy’ and it all should be thrown away. Huh.

drybjed 5 years ago | |

> we need to throw away everything and start from scratch

This has already happened back in the 1990s with Plan 9 from Bell Labs[1] and Inferno[2], but it didn't take due to various factors. With Docker and Kubernetes we are slowly wrangling the current Linux ecosystem to be more akin to Plan 9 environment with private namespaces and networked environment, with "compute" and "storage" servers. But the issues these tools are trying to fix and improve are buried deep in the stack, at the kernel level - fixing them would mean throwing away years of work put into Linux and starting almost from scratch.

Plan 9 was definitely ahead of its time. The original authors learned from their UNIX choices back in the 1970s and looked into the future with a fresh set of eyes. Private process namespaces, lack of a superuser account with full privileges, transparent networking, split of the monolithic system architecture into CPU (compute), fileserver (storage) and terminal with CPU and storage being in the data center on a fast network and terminals being out there used by the users... I would say that this is pretty spot on with 2020s world where cloud and data centers are used almost all the time and end users rely on lightweight (both in a "weight" and in a "computing power" sense) devices to engage with the system at large.

Of course there were missteps as well, nobody's perfect. A byzantine graphical user interface with overfocus on the mouse (today's world overwhelmingly uses touch-based interface instead) probably hinders the newcomers the most. But apart from that, its hard to pick anyhing else that is wrong with the platform in the current world, and most of the things offered at the operating system level are very attractive in today's environment where user applications need to be protected from each other.

Today Plan 9 still lives on[3] and waits for its time to shine. If enough people are fed up with Kubernetes, I would hope that they could see the future elsewhere. There are definitely issues with current Plan 9 ecosystem and its forks that prevent many people to consider it for work, like its graphical interface stuck in the 1990s era when the rest of the computing world evolved and improved. But this can change, new graphical interface can be implemented to scratch someone's itch - that's how most of the current Linux server and desktop environments came to be. So I would say, look at what the OS provides, trim the bad parts away if you don't like them and start working in a fresh environment with good ideas.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) [3]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6m3GuoaxRNM

digitalsushi 5 years ago |

I am growing my anxiety as more layers to the Docker onion grow faster than I can stay current. In the past 2 years my company adopted kubernetes to manage our already confusing Docker infrastructure design, and then they added Rancher to it because no one was making sense of kubernetes.

Meanwhile we're shipping on five year old containers that everyone is afraid to update and no one remembers how to build them. We're building a skyscraper on a floating pier and trying to reach the moon before the tide changes.

I know this is the way, but I am having a hard time because it just doesn't make sense. This doesn't feel like process. It feels like compounding of reactions. Is it just me? My company? Or is this a general feeling?

rsa25519 5 years ago |

See also Nix, which can declaratively generate Dockerfiles (example on home page) :-)

https://nixos.org

TheDong 5 years ago | |

> declaratively generate Dockerfiles

This is inaccurate, assuming you are referring to the 'dockerTools.buildLayeredImage' function in the nixpkgs repository.

That builds docker images declaratively, not dockerfiles.

leetrout 5 years ago |

So this is for me to easily manage all my linters, formatters and such in one image from a group of upstream, published images, right?

pacifika 5 years ago | |

Looks like it. When developer tooling causes conflicts to install globally and tricky to configure with the project (say phpunit) then this can all be taken care of by building it within a docker container. However if the linting also dependent on a specific version of a programming language to test its code now you are no longer testing the production environment.

techntoke 5 years ago |

From the article:

> Docker is an excellent means of distributing those sorts of tools.

No, package managers are excellent means of distributing and managing installed tools. Docker is an excellent way to package the tools, but it's distribution and management are terrible. There isn't even a command to simply show which containers are considered "outdated" without having to repull all your images, which can take 10+ minutes on 30 images.

pacifika 5 years ago |

I guess we are fixing our lack of compatibility story by encasing our tools in fixed environments. Then write new tooling when this is no longer usable.

That seems like a short term view of things.

aasasd 5 years ago |

Pretty sure the name is ungoogleable.

techntoke 5 years ago |

That is what I use Skaffold for

gavinray 5 years ago |

I think I may be a bit slow -- I don't get it =/

joombaga 5 years ago | |

You write declarative manifests that include source repos/tags and destination repos/tags and build arguments, and this thing figures out what commands are needed to get your container registry in the desired state. It outputs those commands. You'd then pass then to an environment that has access rights to make the necessary changes.

gavinray 5 years ago | | |

Ohhhh.

So the example in the repo being, you have some set of tools which you may want to run in CI/CD, or maybe every developer to have the same version of (linters, deployment tools, test runners, etc) and this will figure out the optimal way of pulling them so they're available?

Thanks, makes sense now I think.