Is docker dead?

The simple answer is yes and here is why:

Recently I posted an Instagram story about docker being dead.

Some people didn’t agree to this idea;

So I am going to talk in details:

First of all let’s talk about virtualization components (both virtual machine and container)

As you know virtualization is all about sharing resources, I would divide the components into two main categories;

1) main components

2) managment components

So we can see that we have 3 main components, one for sharing compute resources like CPU and RAM, one for sharing storage and one for sharing network.

This works in both virtual machine and container concepts.

Now let’s have a look at the management components:

Apart from those 3 main components we still need two more; one for managing images (creating, building, transferring) and we need an API like a GUI (could be web or desktop based) and a CLI.

So in short we need 5 components to work in virtualization world.

In the world of containers, docker gives us all these components; so you can already guess that docker is an all in one solution which seems good. But hold on let me explain further:

But do you really need all these components in production environment? I don’t think so, you never need to build images in production environment. You may need to use some other orchestration tools like Kubernetes in production environment. So what happens is that you have many tools and layers installed. In your production environment which is not really needed.

But docker as an all in one solution seems to be ok for development environment which I personally do not prefer.

Because you can have any of those separately as you need them.

Here is a short introduction to these components (tools) that you can install and use them as you need them.

Podman: For creating and destroying containers you can use Podman which is actively maintained by RedHat and open source community.

Buildah : for image creation which is also minted by RedHat.

Kaniko: also for image creation which is created by google, though google is not supporting it but the open source community actively works on it.

For the networking, if you go with Podman it comes in with a networking backend which is called Netavark but you can switch to any CNI as a networking backend.

CNI stands for container networking interface which is used to manage networking for containers(pods).

There are many CNI out there like weave, fannel, calico and cilium.