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What advice can you give to a beginner?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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Docker? Steep learning curve? You drunk mate?
When it comes to software the hype is currently setup a minimal Linux box (old computer, NAS, Raspberry Pi) and then install everything using Docker containers. I don’t like this Docker trend because it 1) leads you towards a dependence on property repositories and 2) robs you from the experience of learning Linux (more here) but I it does lower the bar to newcomers and let’s anyone setup something really fast.
In my opinion people should be very skeptical about everything that is “sold to the masses”, just go with a simple Debian system (command line only) SSH into it and install whatever is required / taking the time to actually learn Linux and whatnot.
I'd like to point out this is a hot take.
Enterprise infrastructure has been moving to containers for years because of scale and redundancy. Spinning up new VMs for every app failover is bloat and wasteful if it is able to be put in a container.
To really use them well, like everything in IT, understanding the underlying tech can be essential.
Yes, that’s a valid use case. But the enterprise is also moving to containers because the big tech companies are pushing them into it. What people forget is that containerization also makes splitting hardware and billing customers very easy for cloud providers, something that was a real pain before. Why do you think that google, Microsoft and Amazon never got into the infrastructure business before?
Amazon was in the infrastructure business well before containers were the "big thing".
You're missing the point.
What are you even claiming? Billing is the same ease VM or container.
Cgroups became a thing in 2004 and then Google and Amazon started container offerings in 2008.
And you don't even need docker there are plenty of alternative engines.
Before containers, when hosting was mostly shared stuff (very hard to bill and very expensive when it comes to support) or VMs that people wouldn't buy because they were expensive.
Hmm I should maybe have added that I only ever touched docker cli tools and have never used a front end of any kind. I do know that they exists, but I like having my fingers in the mechanical room so to speak so it gave me a quite steep learning curve writing my own docker compose files from scratch and learning the syntax, environment variables and volumes working manually. I still to this day only use cli version of Docker because its the only thing I ever learned.
But you know that most people don't even do that. They simply download a bunch of pre-made yaml files and use whatever GUI. You would still learn more without docker.
I can see that quickly becoming an issue if people just run random yaml files without understanding the underlying functions. I'm happy I never took that route because I leaned so much