cute headline :) ( at least I think so as a node JavaScript developer ) . all fun aside, I love docker ( and previously vagrant ) as an on demand mobile back end for native iOS and android Dev. it works isolate, disconnected , and can be deployed when I need to stage for reviews . its great !
Except that Douglas Crockford was talking about Javascript which (at the time that book was published, and perhaps even now) was viewed as a steaming pile of crap. So he wrote a book that highlighted "the good".
Docker is a pretty modern piece of tech, that has very little wrong with it, and seems to work exactly as designed. So you are kind of shoe horning the reference...
While I think the bad parts of Javascript are far more bad than the bad parts of Docker, I think it's fair to call out the good parts of Docker in such a way that the reader walks away and starts thinking "well, okay, but I'm guessing there are some bad parts too - now what are they?".
I'm a pretty smart person; I've poured over the Docker documentation, run through the interactive tutorial twice now, and I still don't have a great sense of 1) what it really is for, 2) how to really use it, or 3) how to handle slightly-non trivial use cases.
For #3, reading through a few examples online of how to get MySQL or Redis up and running in a container... honestly makes my head hurt. And those represent just one or two parts of the system I'm thinking could some day run on Docker - I don't have the time or patience right now to figure out how to get Nginx, Node.js, Redis, MySQL, RabbitMQ, and a few other things here or there - stitched together into a dockerfile.
If I had to make a guess at what the "bad parts" of Docker are, it's that it's complex and not all that understandable - yet. Maybe there aren't that many things that are technically wrong with it, but at this point, it's pretty painful to wrap one's mind around (IMO), and at least I personally think thats a "bad" part.
Docker feels like one of those things that is going to be indispensable and incredibly useful in a year or two. I'm certainly keeping my eye on it, but I'm staying away from the diving board for now.
That would be incredible - would you be willing to shoot me an email? rringham@letsgohomeapp.com
I'd be happy to take whatever I learn and apply to my app and contribute it back to the community, maybe as a quick tutorial up on GitHub, or something along those lines.
Docker has kinks in its armour as well. There are some pretty irritating issues like #643 and #1171. Anyway, the naming wasn't done with that intention. I agree that the context just isn't the same.
Those are not really Docker issues they are upstream Linux issues. 42 layers of aufs is probably a sane limit, the NFS one looks at a glance like an obscure NFS bug...
