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KronisLVtoday at 1:06 PM3 repliesview on HN

> the container stack complexity

I'm using either Docker Compose or Docker Swarm without Kubernetes, and there's not that much of it, to be honest. My "ingress" is just an Apache2 container that's bound to 80/443 and my storage is either volumes or bind mounts, with no need for more complexity there.

> The jails vs containers framing is interesting but I think it misses why Docker actually won. It wasn't the isolation tech. It was the ecosystem: Dockerfiles as executable documentation, a public registry, and compose for local dev. You could pull an image and have something running in 30 seconds without understanding anything about cgroups or namespaces.

So where's Jailsfiles? Where's Jail Hub (maybe naming needs a bit of work)? Where's Jail Desktop or Jail Compose or Jail Swarm or Jailbernetes?

It feels like either the people behind the various BSDs don't care much for what allowed Docker to win, or they're unable to compete with it, which is a shame, because it'd probably be somewhere between a single and double digit percent userbase growth if they decided to do it and got it right. They already have some of the foundational tech, so why not the UX and the rest of it?


Replies

whizztertoday at 4:44 PM

I think Jails started as a tool of it's time, it's about the same thing as virtualization in making isolated systems when dependencies start to diverge, but aimed at the issues of sysadmins that had to manage their own systems, not a quick developer experience.

Even if "jailsfiles" were created the ecosystem would need to start from scratch and sometimes it feels like people in the FreeBSD ecosystem have a hard enough time keeping ports somewhat up to date, let alone create something new.

Luckily Podman seems to support FreeBSD these days for docker images, but the Linux emualation might be a bit of a blocker so not a 100% solution.

jacquesmtoday at 2:40 PM

> I'm using either Docker Compose or Docker Swarm without Kubernetes, and there's not that much of it, to be honest.

On the outside. But that's a lot of complexity hidden from view there, easily a couple of million lines of code on top of the code that you wrote.

jcgrillotoday at 5:47 PM

I never used this, but noticed it in some docs back when I was using Nomad and thought it was an intriguing idea: https://github.com/cneira/jail-task-driver