
Introduction to Containerization - fagnerbrack
https://medium.com/devopslinks/the-missing-introduction-to-containerization-de1fbb73efc5
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agtucker
> In February 2004, Oracle released Oracle Solaris Containers, an
> implementation of Linux-Vserver for X86 and SPARC processors.

Umm, no. It was Sun Solaris Containers (Oracle didn't purchase Sun until
2010), and it wasn't at all an implementation of Linux-VServer (which already
ran on X86 and SPARC processors in any case). Actually the original
inspiration for Solaris Containers (aka zones) was FreeBSD jails.

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raja
A great history of containerization starting from chroot type jailed
environments in the late 1970s to the dizzying plethora of options we have
today.

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defen
So...this all seems insanely complicated. Is there any kind of rough guidance
about how "big" an organization or codebase needs to be before it becomes a
net win to go down this path? Either in terms of lines of code or number of
services or requests served or servers needed or any other kind of metric?
Obviously the breakeven point is somewhere between "CRUD app that runs for
free in Heroku" and "millions of requests served per second" but I don't know
where it is.

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danbeaulieu
Think about using containers if any of the below apply:

\- You have heard or said the words "Hmm, it worked on my machine"

\- You run or want to run multiple applications on the same host

\- You care about software supply chain

\- You think serverless patterns may apply to your workloads

\- Scheduling applications on to your infrastructure is manual

~~~
defen
> \- You have heard or said the words "Hmm, it worked on my machine"

I currently use VirtualBox + SaltStack to solve this problem, which has worked
well and has significantly less overhead than going full Docker / K8s

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dtjohnnyb
Does anyone know if there's a similarly great "missing introduction to
containerization," but for a less CS oriented audience.

I'm currently trying to convince my team members that using a dockerised
version of our internal django project is great for loads of reasons
(portability and use in continuous integration being the main two I'm trying
to sell on as our team is rapidly growing from 4 developers last year to 12
this year)

However, these reasons aren't resonating with them, since they're not seeing
the cracks starting to form with the growing development team, and to them the
project is working just fine on the server as is and the very simple CI is
working just fine as is.

Are there good case studies or historical perspective that would help show how
containerization may help as we grow even further over the next while?

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bunderbunder
TBH, if I were you, I would wait until they see the cracks starting to form
for themselves.

Containerization isn't perfect, and has its own challenges. There will be
growing pains as you move to it, especially if most the team is unfamiliar
with the technology. If you try to push it before people perceive (for
themselves) that they are experiencing some of the problems that it's designed
to solve, then, on top of all that, you're going to have an audience that sees
it as a solution in search of a problem.

Conditions like that are just about perfect for kicking off a chain of events
that leads to yet another "Containerization is the worst idea ever, never
containerize anything" blog post entering the world.

~~~
dtjohnnyb
Appreciate the measured warning, as you mentioned there's a lot of strong
opinions either way so it's hard to find the more practical advice among it
all which is what inspired the original question.

I'll take all the advice here and get better understanding of the overheads
and pain myself (and hopefully a few other interested folk) so that when the
cracks do start showing properly there's a working containerized solution to
roll out more smoothly.

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panpanna
Great article.

But I feel there is a slight confusion about where LXC ends and LXD starts.

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peterwwillis
Great start of an article. Question: why are we documenting this stuff in blog
posts, rather than a Wiki?

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ldng
The kind of article I started writing ! Only in much better than my draft :-)

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anonoholic
But that picture... doesn't have any container ships in it!

