<story><title>Containers Will Not Fix a Broken Culture</title><url>https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3185224</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mailslot</author><text>So many companies I&amp;#x27;ve interviewed for are rushing toward microservices and containerization as the cure to all problems. The problem is that the champions often have no clue what any of this means.&lt;p&gt;I recently spoke with a company that had no testing whatsoever for a large production app. When I asked about it, they proudly said &amp;quot;Oh, we do CI. We have Jenkins!&amp;quot; Any tests? &amp;quot;We&amp;#x27;re going to add them after we move to microservices. Moving away from our monolith is top priority because monoliths are difficult to debug.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I see a ton of companies shitting all over best practices and then chanting buzzwords to pretend that they&amp;#x27;re all about it. That, or gross misunderstanding of any concept behind buzzwords.&lt;p&gt;X company uses Docker. We should use Docker. &amp;quot;Um. This code runs on an FPGA.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Does it run Docker?&amp;quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>Containers Will Not Fix a Broken Culture</title><url>https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3185224</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>apeace</author><text>This is really off-base, misses the point, and is another form of the &amp;quot;you don&amp;#x27;t need containers&amp;quot; criticism which has become very tired at this point.&lt;p&gt;This is mostly a critique of microservice architectures, not containers. If that were the main point I&amp;#x27;d have little disagreement.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Someone in security is weeping for the unpatched CVEs...&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; ...the heavyweight app containers shipping a full operating system aren&amp;#x27;t being maintained at all...&lt;p&gt;This is just wrong, it&amp;#x27;s the opposite of that. Never have I had more up-to-date operating systems, programming languages, and frameworks than when I started using containers. It&amp;#x27;s just so damn easy, especially if you use `FROM python:3` instead of `FROM python:3.6.2`. It auto-updates every time you deploy.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; There is no substitute for experimentation in your real production environment; containers are orthogonal to that...&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;re not orthogonal to it, they&amp;#x27;re a really useful way to get &lt;i&gt;very, very close&lt;/i&gt; to production. The maxim isn&amp;#x27;t untrue, but again, I sleep better than I ever have in my life because I know that these problems are now rare for me. The difference between my local, staging, and production is tiny. I haven&amp;#x27;t encountered such an issue in over a year.&lt;p&gt;All of the problems in the article are true no matter what tools you use to build and deploy. The author focuses a lot on developers&amp;#x27; desire to go off in a corner and build their own little world. That&amp;#x27;s still a risk if you&amp;#x27;re using Ansible or Chef.&lt;p&gt;Bottom line: writing a Dockerfile is the most powerful way I&amp;#x27;ve ever found to define your OS&amp;#x27;s configuration in code. Stop discouraging people from trying it just so you can make grand arguments about the types of problems every engineering team faces.</text></comment>