I was going through my articles I have collected over the years and found this little gem. The author is unknown.
I AM THE FLAG OF THE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
I am the flag of the United States of America.
My name is Old Glory.
I fly atop the world’s tallest buildings.
I stand watch in America’s halls of justice.
I fly majestically over institutions of learning.
I stand guard with power in the world.
Look up and see me.
I have been reading a few articles that have been published recently regarding the use of docker in production. Of the articles I read, all seem to complain about the instability of docker, the docker ecosystem, and they lament persistent storage. While I have not run docker in production for a lengthy amount of time, I can determine these issues are from operator error and are not entirely docker’s fault.
One article I read came out and boldly said that docker created a new file system in one year and it is not humanly possible to have created one in such a short amount of time. I think this article writer has never heard of the DevOps philosophy nor the minimum viability product (MVP). Basically, you do not need 100% of the features to have a working product. This makes it clearly possible to build a single file system – though not have all of the features – within a short time frame. It is also noted that a year in this development process, a second file system was created. Just like in real life, if you wait to ship a product with 100% of the features, you will never ship the product.
If you are losing data due to not properly mounting the volumes to a HA storage network (such as GlusterFS or DRBD) – you deserve to have lost the data. I know what it is like to lose 50TB of unique data due to a failed storage device, no current backups, and the shame and cost of having to send it over to DriveSavers (which they are!) for recovery. That is a painful experience and not worth repeating. If you do the same thing and expect different results, the issue lies with the operator and not the tool. Drastic changes were made when loss occurred including developing a new backup solution and having 1-to-1 replication of the data. It has also fine grained a permanent memory in my subsystem to not let that happen ever again.
Personally, I think running docker in a public cloud is a waste of company resources – there is no price difference between a VM and 1 docker image on AWS’ EC2 container platform of the same capacity. Even if you spun up an Atomic Host or similar, you still have to deal with networking constraints for your file storage. This is something best handled in house as you can scale your network infrastructure to match your workload.
The most important factor in all of this fuss about docker is that it is open source software. If you do not have the capacity to find flaws, make patches, and submit those patches for review to upstream, you are better off using a proprietary product that does not have such needs. Again, the issue lies in the operators and not the tools.
Let’s face it, Linux is a kernel and no matter what distribution you use, it is all the same. You have a repository of packages, you get a package manager to manage your packages, you get a desktop environment, and you get freedom to tinker down to the lowest level of the kernel to configure things like IP routing and forwarding.
Differences lie in the release cycle of the distribution, package names, and the default desktop environment – though you can find spins to even change that part. Each are trying to tackle a specific problem and come with a solution. It may be security, research, UI, stability, or even high performance computing.
If starting out, pick a user friendly distribution like Ubuntu or Debian. Use it with the defaults for 6 months while trying to learn as much as you can. Then move onto the specific use cases for Enterprise, you can use CentOS, RedHat, Ubuntu, or SUSE (you will get the best hardware/software support if you go that route) for home use, you may want to go with Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, Gentoo, Fedora or anything you want to use; for embedded, you may go with Debian, Yocto, Gentoo, OpenEmbedded, OpenWRT, and others; for stability and security, you may want to go with Debian or one of the Enterprise distributions.
At the end of the day, it is all built upon the Linux kernel – unless you are using the Debian BSD fork.
We live in the year 2016 – anyone who does not know how to use basic computer functionality (such as email, using a word processor, decyphering between a spreadsheet and database, etc.) should not be allowed to hold public office. Why? Here is my main reason: