init-snapshot VS bocker

Unless they’ve changed things, there is no containerization within the VM a la kata. They run their own custom init inside the VM and use it to start the entry point. https://github.com/superfly/init-snapshot is the source.

Jerome wrote our init in Rust, and, after being cajoled by Josh Triplett, [we released the code (https://github.com/superfly/init-snapshot), which you can go read.

Bocker[1] does a reasonably good job of showing the value of Docker was mostly in Docker hub.

[1] https://github.com/p8952/bocker

Surprised no one has mentioned Bocker yet – “Docker implemented in around 100 lines of bash”. [1, 2]

[1]: https://github.com/p8952/bocker/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33218094

I was part of this, it was a fun project. I have a final pull request that never made it though, and that's too bad as it addressed some hardcoding issues and added a few helpful commands: https://github.com/p8952/bocker/pull/23

Revisiting the project, it looks like more people tried submitting PRs for the following couple years. Funny, for a project that was definitely an exercise in "do X in 100 lines of code"

> there was this bash-based Docker reimplementation

https://github.com/p8952/bocker? Last commit was 7 years ago, and even then this was more of an experiment / PoC - I really don't think this was ever meant as a viable replacement. (IMHO Bash is a horrible language as well.)

I agree with your sentiment on container/cloud tooling. It doesn't need to be this complicated, the needs of the 1% are dictating the experience for the 99%. However Docker (the basic CLI interface) and Dockerfile (the format) did a lot to bring containers to the mainstream, and you can still get quite a lot out of it by just sticking to the basics. For self-hosting simple services, or even just deploying your application, on plain old VPS/box-under-the-desk, it's still just plain brilliant; at least compared to loading files into a shotgun and aiming in the general direction of /opt, /usr/local, /home/app, /etc.

They still don't do anything really of substance, they're just gateways to their vendor's world - booking systems, payment systems, etc. You learn those as you go along. Yes, as a potential employee, you need to be able to tick those boxes on your CV, but if you understand the underlying technology, it's mostly a matter of booking your own AWS or Azure server for $5-10 a month for a few weeks, and fooling around. (Docker is a bit different in the sense that they were the first to popularize today's de-facto container image standard, the "Docker container", which has since been accepted as a proper standard and renamed to "OCI image format"; but at the end of the day, at this point in time, Docker in itself is still just a company out for the money, and the multi-GB installation of their product can, for the essential functionality part, be replaced by a few hundred lines of Bash code. The cool boys today don't use Docker, they use [Podman(https://podman.io/), which is essentially a much more lightweight drop-in replacement ;-) )

https://github.com/p8952/bocker/blob/master/bocker

Unpack the tarballs in order and you’ve got the filesystem layout the container expects to run in. Pull the “config” JSON and you’ve got the entrypoint to run for the container; you could, I guess, pull and run a Docker container with nothing but a shell script, which I’m probably the 1,000th person to point out. At any rate here’s the whole thing.

Bocker Was Docker implemented in 119 lines of bash But The Project Stopped A Few Years Ago So, I Was Wondering If Anyone Knows There's A Fork Of It Still Alive?