(more) debian docker images, cloud image optimisations
Hi,
(finally hitting 'send' on a long-drafted first-post to the list. Hello!)
In the last couple of months I've been working with Docker. I read Joey Hess'
blog post[1] on the subject which I found very interesting, in particular his
advice "I'd recommend only trusting docker images you build yourself.". So I
prepared a basic Dockerfile to build such images, and shared that[2,3].
I agreed with Joey that images named 'debian' should be 'Debian' and much of
the docker customisations to their 'debian' images might be suprising to
people, so the scripts/Dockerfiles I prepared are as close to pristine as
possible.
However, for executing in a docker/cloud/container environment, some of the
changes they make do make a lot of sense. E.g. turning off caching, including
disk caching (unsafe-io), etc.: since the mantra is, if a container fails,
start a new one. There are other optimisations they *don't* make that we could
potentially do, as I mention in my blog post, such as some of the things that
the emdebian project did.
Some of these changes are no doubt useful in other cloud contexts other than
Docker. (no doubt other cloud images make such changes).
I think it would be useful if we as a project could choose a name for a 'cloud'
debian flavour, which incorporated some of these changes, so people could use
it and not be surprised when e.g. translations were missing, or unsafe-io was
on, or documentation wasn't present, etc.
Thoughts?
[1] http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/docker_run_debian/
[2] http://jmtd.net/log/debian_docker/
[3] https://github.com/jmtd/debian-docker/
--
Jonathan Dowland
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