Docker, what's this ?

[yordan 10]

Do you use Docker ? What's that ? How does it work ?

Looks like a good old command-line ms-dos thing, am I true ?

[yordan 10]

Of course, I guess that it's a kind of virtualization, each thing should behave as a virtual private system. However, it still seems mysterious to me. And everything I find looks like marketing b...lshit, no technical explanation nor description.

[mastercomputers 0]

Docker is container platform for containerised applications/programs. It's like virtualisation but not in the sense like a virtual machine but more like a virtual environment.

So imagine I developed a program called xisto.forums that I based on the yordan.helper file which is developed by you. Now in a normal system, you are required to install xisto.forums as well as the required yordan.helper file. When running a container platform however, you create a container that includes all the files you need with it. So in my container you will  have xisto.forums and yordan.helper. You now have all the necessary files required to run xisto.forums.

Things to understand:

You have the version that I used to create the program, so it's tied to that particular version.

These containers will not interfere with your system files because they are ran in their own environment. So if I included yordan.helper v1.0 but your current system has yordan.helper v3.2, they will not conflict.

I could include a newer version or older version than what you currently have. Sometimes with slow to update/upgrade software, you maybe able to find a container that is more uptodate than what your operating system provides.

Since they do not make use of your installed system files/libraries, they can be huge in size because they will contain everything necessary to run it.

You can run multiple versions of different containers.

There's a lot of pros and cons to doing this and whether you need it or not. For me, if there's a need to run old software, maybe that's the way, for newer software my Linux distribution is a rolling release and maintains very bleeding edge software in which case I'm never far behind with software I need to run. The file sizes can be ridiculous, even in the GBs. There is some work being done on sharing common container files/libraries to reduce the size. You could try it first before you actually install it properly. There's much more pros and cons but these things may improve over time.

 

Cheers,

MC

[yordan 10]

22 minutes ago, mastercomputers said:

You could try it first before you actually install it properly.

Wow! Trying before installing, that's a very interesting point!

[mastercomputers 0]

Not only trying before installing. You may decide on just running the container instead and not risk things going wrong. However, things can go wrong in containers just like they do with normal environments. Although, containers are like sandbox environments. I believe you can snapshot them and restore them easily. So if you tested a browser in a container and it got infected with a homepage changer, you could easily just restore that container and have the insurance that it only affected that container and you easily fixed it without having to take steps necessary to remove malware.

This maybe safer, but this does not mean you drop your security because of the way you run things. People are always trying to exploit while others are trying to prevent. You need to still keep on top of things.

One thing I didn't mention, you can build a vast library of containers and only use them on a needs to basis. So you may store LibreOffice away on storage and grab it when you need it, then store it away when you're done.

Cheers,

MC

[yordan 10]

20 minutes ago, mastercomputers said:

This maybe safer, but this does not mean you drop your security

Of course. a snapshot is a backup. Security is there for avoiding problem to occur,  or solve the problem if it happen to occur. If the security people do not succeed preventing or solving the problem, then you restore your backup.