Re: [Tools-implementation] Revisiting whether we should continue using Docker as we currently do.

[Glen <[e-mail]>]

My full support and agreement here.  To clarify:  I suggested *not* 
doing it only because I didn't want to be the cause of heartburn or the 
loud voice whining.  :-)  But these arguments are persuasive, and I 
agree with everything said here, both in terms of present *and* future 
planning.

Glen

On 9/9/2020 09:21, Robert Sparks wrote:
> A few weeks ago, shortly after the yc.o team's work managed to crash the 
> host they were working on through changing settings in a container, I 
> proposed that we unroll the things we currently have in containers on 
> production. At the time, Glen suggested we not do that. I'd like to ask 
> the question again - I think we may have more to consider.
> 
> 1. I remain uneasy about docker's implementation on OpenSuse. The 
> container crash above, the issues we've run into with containers locking 
> (and sometimes causing processes talking to them like apache) to hang 
> are suspicious. That we've not been able to pin down what's really going 
> on suggests to me the issue is in a place we can't really look, inside 
> docker's interstitial networking or filesystem abstraction code perhaps.
> 
> 2. Many of the containers we have (and in particular the one for the 
> website) really need to be designed differently if they are going to 
> remain deployed as containers. The amount of file-system mapping they do 
> is not what the docker architects expect as a normal use-case. Mapping 
> sockets in the way we do is also likely not something they focus on 
> testing.
> 
> 3. Docker is making Glen uncomfortable and the benefit for him 
> (operationally) of the containerization is not proportional to the extra 
> problems it is bringing.
> 
> So I again suggest that we unroll for the production deploys, at least 
> for now. I think we can unroll everything at this point, but there might 
> still be a hitch in unrolling the trac instances. Henrik - could you 
> remind me what our thinking was with respect to those?
> 
> I do plan to keep up the pressure to have containerized versions of 
> these services - this isn't a call to abandon Docker - but I suggest we 
> need to change how we're currently using it.
> 
> RjS
> 
>