for-win VS nerdctl

Fifth thing: Bricker of Windows

https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/1549

Still pissed my HP Windows laptop was bricked from it a few months ago. I’ll never use it for anything.

I use containers on Mac and Windows for development (and we deploy on linux). Docker for Mac is _unusably_ slow in my experience. The VM that it runs is a giant resource hog and a battery hog, and doesn't support ipv6 [0] Docker Desktop itself is (another) resource hog, wildly buggy, and painfully slow. It's the epitome of "shitty electron app".

On windows, docker desktop has all of the same issues as it does on mac. Docker's concept of volumes and file permissions on windows are nonsense. Windows updates and Docker Desktop regularly decide to disagree, [1] It's networking support interferes with other applications (like OpenVPN and the Xbox Game Center) [2].

[0] https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/1432

[1] https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/599

[2] https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/1976

I have a GitHub post here I made that goes into more detail: https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/13320

possibly related to https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/13324 ?

> FWIW, when denying the request to wootric, the docker daemon crashes.

A yes, this about fits the standard of engineering I've come to expect from Docker.

Anyway, I couldn't find any references too "woocentric" anywhere in the code; looks like this part isn't open source? I did find this other issue: https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/12718 with a comment from May 2022:

"At some point we found out that bugsnag was actually sending a «session creation» request of some sort when initialized, even if no crash was actually being reported. We believed we had fixed that, but I just checked with a MITM proxy and it appears to have regressed… There may be some other services doing something similar without us realizing (wootric, …).

We have created a ticket in our internal backlog to review all this."

Docker Github issue

I ran into this error ( no matching manifest for linux/amd64 in the manifest list entries ), so I tried again on my Windows machine. But then I realized that Docker on Windows actually just runs on WSL2, and it's technically Linux as well! Supposedly, I can switch to Windows containers by clicking on "Switch to Linux container...", but I guess apparently not on Windows 10 Home?? https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/9701

What about the docker-cli? colima also ships with a docker-compatible cli to interact with containerd called nerdctl. We can execute the same docker cli commands like:

Using nerdctl: https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl

I'd really disagree that compose files are somehow one-shot, or blindly modified. To the contrary, really, we have them checked in with the source code. Upon deployment to the cluster, the (running) services will be intelligently updated or replaced (in a rolling manner, causing zero downtime). LXC might be more elegant, but I have no idea what simple, file-based format I could use to let engineers describe the environment their app should run in without compose.

I need something that even junior devs can start up with a single command, that can be placed in the VCS along with the code, and that will not require deep Linux knowledge to get running. Open for suggestions here, really.

Now since Kubernetes works off of containerd I'll be taking a different approach on handling container builds by using nerdctl and the buildkit that comes bundled with it. I'll do this on the amd64 control plane node since it's beefier than my Raspberry Pi workers for handling builds and build related services. Go ahead and download and unpack the latest nerdctl release as of writing (make sure to check the release page in case there's a new one):

That's why nerdctl, their cli binary, is so well named.

Well, it is indeed a good option. However, containerd is a good alternative that is growing even among developers. Please see: https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl

Nerdctl/containerd has IPFS support :)

https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl/blob/main/docs/ipfs.md

nerdctl supports IPFS for both image pulling and pushing, including encrypted images and eStargz lazy pulling. For building, the current method is a locally hosted translator so that the traditional pulls can be converted to work over IPFS. They even have docs on running it on k8s node, though if my reading is correct this isn't exactly a cloud native approach (running systemd services on each node...).