official-images VS dagger

Ubuntu now has snapshot.ubuntu.com, see https://ubuntu.com/blog/ubuntu-snapshots-on-azure-ensuring-p...

Related discussion about reproducible builds by the Docker people: https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/issues/160...

> In their updated policy, it appears they now won't remove any existing images, but projects who don't pay up will not be able to publish any new images

This is not correct. It's the "organization" features are going away. That is the feature which lets you create teams, add other users to those teams, and grant teams access to push images and access private repositories. Multiple maintainers can still collaborate on publishing new images through use of access tokens which grant access to publish those images. It's kind of a hack, but it works. You would typically use these access tokens with automated CI tools anyway. This will require converting the organization account to a personal user (non-org) account. (Interesting note/disclosure: I was the engineer who first implemented the feature of converting a personal user account into an organization account some time around 2014/2015, but I no longer work there.)

For open source projects which are not part of the Docker Official Images (the "library" images [1]), they announced that such projects can apply to the Docker-Sponsored Open Source Program [2].

I would also heed the warning from the author of this article:

> Self-hosting a registry is not free, and it's more work than it sounds: it's a proper piece of infrastructure, and comes with all the obligations that implies, from monitoring to promptly applying security updates to load & disk-space management. Nobody (let alone tiny projects like these) wants this job.

Having most container images hosted by a handful of centralized registries has its problems, as noted, but so does an alternative scenario where multiple projects which decided to go self-hosted eventually lack the resources to continue doing so for their legacy users. Though, I suppose the nice thing about container images is that you can always pull and push them somewhere else to keep around indefinitely.

[1] https://hub.docker.com/u/library

Indeed. While I do maintain two of them, that maintenance is effectively equivalent to being an open source maintainer or open source contributor. I do not have any non-public knowledge about the Docker Official Images program. My interaction with the Docker Official Images program can be summed up as “my PRs to docker-library/official-images” (https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/pulls/TimW...) and the #docker-library IRC channel on Libera.Chat.

"AdoptOpenJDK up until now was producing OpenJDK binaries with both Hotspot and OpenJ9 VM's. With Adopt's move to Eclipse, legal restrictions prevent the new Eclipse Adoptium group from producing/releasing OpenJ9 based binaries. As a result, IBM will be producing OpenJ9 based binaries in 2 flavours, Open and Certified, both under the family name IBM Semeru Runtimes. Essentially the same binaries, released under different licenses."

Source: https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/pull/10666...

They should be available soon, the corresponding PR at docker-library/official-images has already been merged: https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/pull/13693

Official image lists are added here: https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/tree/master/library

Looks like this PR will release the official version to the hub: https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/pull/12382

We’ve also officially release containers for ppc64le available on all the major registries and we’ve also gone ahead and updated our containers to 8.5.4 and patched against the latest security updates where applicable. 18 packages have been updated and you can see that work here.

The fact that I couldn't point to one page on the docs that shows the tl;dr or the what problem is this solving

https://docs.dagger.io/quickstart/562821/hello just emits "Hello, world!" which is fantastic if you're writing a programming language but less helpful if you're trying to replace a CI/CD pipeline. Then, https://docs.dagger.io/quickstart/292472/arguments doubles down on that fallacy by going whole hog into "if you need printf in your pipline, dagger's got your back". The subsequent pages have a lot of english with little concrete examples of what's being shown.

I summarized my complaint in the linked thread as "less cowsay in the examples" but to be honest there are upteen bazillion GitHub Actions out in the world, not the very least of which your GHA pipelines use some https://github.com/dagger/dagger/blob/v0.10.2/.github/workfl... https://github.com/dagger/dagger/blob/v0.10.2/.github/workfl... so demonstrate to a potential user how they'd run any such pipeline in dagger, locally, or in Jenkins, or whatever by leveraging reusable CI functions that setup go or run trivy

Related to that, I was going to say "try incorporating some of the dagger that builds dagger" but while digging up an example, it seems that dagger doesn't make use of the functions yet <https://github.com/dagger/dagger/tree/v0.10.2/ci#readme> which is made worse by the perpetual reference to them as their internal codename of Zenith. So, even if it's not invoked by CI yet, pointing to a WIP PR or branch or something to give folks who have CI/CD problems in their head something concrete to map into how GHA or GitLabCI or Jenkins or something would go a long way

> GHA has "service containers", but unfortunately the feature is too basic to address real-world use cases: it assumes a container image can just … boot! … and only talk to the code via the network. Real world use cases often require serialized steps between the test & the dependencies, e.g., to create or init database dirs, set up certs, etc.)

My biased recommendation is to write a custom Dagger function, and run it in your GHA workflow. https://dagger.io

If you find me on the Dagger discord, I will gladly write a code snippet summarizing what I have in mind, based on what you explained of your CI stack. We use GHA ourselves and use this pattern to great effect.

Disclaimer: I work there :)

Dagger (https://dagger.io) is a great way to use BuildKit through language SDKs. It's such a better paradigm, I cannot imagine going back.

Dagger is by the same folks that brought us Docker. This is their fresh take on solving the problem of container building and much more. BuildKit can more than build images and Dagger unlocks it for you.

And suddenly, it's almost painfully obvious where all the pain came from. Cloud applications today are simply a patchwork of disconnected pieces. I have a compiler for my infrastructure, another for my functions, another for my containers, another for my CI/CD pipelines. Each one takes its job super seriously, and keeps me safe and happy inside each of these machines, but my application is not running on a single machine anymore, my application is running on the cloud.

That said I've been moving my CI/CD to https://dagger.io/ which has been FANTASTIC. It's code based so you can define all your pipelines in Go, Python, or Javascript and they all run on containers so I can run actions locally without any special setup. Highly recommended.

You are right make is arcane. But it gets the job done. There are new exciting things happening in this area. Check out https://dagger.io.

> but I'm not convinced it's ready to replace Gitlab CI.

The purpose of Dagger it's not to replace your entire CI (Gitlab in your case). As you can see from our website (https://dagger.io/engine), it works and integrates with all the current CI providers. Where Dagger really shines is to help you and your teams move all the artisanal scripts encoded in YAML into actual code and run them in containers through a fluent SDK which can be written in your language of choice. This unlocks a lot of benefits which are detailed in our docs (https://docs.dagger.io/).

> Dagger has one very big downside IMO: It does not have native integration with Gitlab, so you end up having to use Docker-in-Docker and just running dagger as a job in your pipeline.

This is not correct. Dagger doesn't depend on Docker. We're just conveniently using Docker (and other container runtimes) as it's generally available pretty much everywhere by default as a way to bootstrap the Dagger Engine. You can read more about the Dagger architecture here: https://github.com/dagger/dagger/blob/main/core/docs/d7yxc-o...

As you can see from our docs (https://docs.dagger.io/759201/gitlab-google-cloud/#step-5-cr...), we're leveraging the *default* Gitlab CI `docker` service to bootstrap the engine. There's no `docker-in-docker` happening there.

> It clumps all your previously separated steps into a single step in the Gitlab pipeline.

This is also not the case, we should definitely improve our docs to reflect that. You can organize your dagger pipelines in multiple functions and call them in separate Gitlab jobs as you're currently doing. For example, you can do the following:

```.gitlab-ci.yml

Check out https://dagger.io/. Write declarative pipelines in code, reproducibly run anywhere.

Is this similar to Dagger[1] ?

[1] https://dagger.io