I ditched Docker for Podman

Back in 2001/2002, I was charged with building a WiFi hotspot box. I was a fan of OpenBSD and wanted to slim down our deployment, which was running on Python, to avoid having to copy a ton of unnecessary files to the destination systems. I also wanted to avoid dependency-hell. Naturally, I turned to `chroot` and the jails concept.

My deployment code worked by running the software outside of the jail environment and monitoring the running processes using `ptrace` to see what files it was trying to open. The `ptrace` output generated a list of dependencies, which could then be copied to create a deployment package.

This worked brilliantly and kept our deployments small and immutable and somewhat immune to attack -- not that being attacked was a huge concern in 2001 as it is today. When Docker came along, I couldn't help but recall that early work and wonder whether anyone has done a similar thing to monitor file usage within Docker containers and trim them down to size after observing actual use.

The best CI/CD pipeline I ever used was my first freelance deployment using Django. I didn't have a clue what I was doing and had to phone a friend.

We set up a git post receive hook which built static files and restarted httpd on a git receive. Deployment was just 'git push live master'.

While I've used Docker a lot since then, that remains the single easiest deployment I've ever had.

I genuinely don't understand what docker brings to the table. I mean, I get the value prop. But it's really not that hard to set up http on vanilla Ubuntu (or God forbid, OpenBSD) and not really have issues.

Is the reproducibility of docker really worth the added overhead of managing containers, docker compose, and running daemons on your devbox 24/7?