<story><title>The sad state of web app deployment</title><url>http://eev.ee/blog/2015/09/17/the-sad-state-of-web-app-deployment/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wpietri</author><text>As another old-school type, I really enjoy this rant. And my understanding is that the piece of software in question is a nest of snakes, so I can well believe that there is no good way to install it, only bad ways and worse ways.&lt;p&gt;But having tried out Docker for some production deployments, I think that it (or some less goofy successor) is the way forward. You get a sealed box with all the necessary dependencies, and the box has just enough holes poked in it that you can connect up the bits you care about. It turns apps into appliances, not things you need expert craftspeople to lovingly install.&lt;p&gt;As much as I have enjoyed 25 years of doing everything on an OS whose conceptual model is a 70s university department minicomputer, this era is coming to a close. We already know it&amp;#x27;s a poor match for existing hardware and use cases because we now mostly run it in virtual servers. But &amp;quot;virtual server&amp;quot; is the new &amp;quot;horseless carriage&amp;quot;. It&amp;#x27;s a phrase that tells us we are living in a future we don&amp;#x27;t yet fully understand.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>csirac2</author><text>I love Docker; it&amp;#x27;s solved a lot of problems for me. But this article highlights the laziness that it can enable: there has to be a middle ground between traditional package management and all of the curation&amp;#x2F;QA that goes into getting stable releases out to multiple distributions, versus chucking shit over the wall into a git repo with a Dockerfile and calling it done.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a better, more isolated mess - but for anyone trying to enforce configuration policy into all of the running services in their environment, untangling gortesquely basic shit like not granting superuser privs on a database to your webapps - which would never fly in a traditional distro package - becomes even more work than the old source tarballs with INSTALL.txt.</text></comment>
<story><title>The sad state of web app deployment</title><url>http://eev.ee/blog/2015/09/17/the-sad-state-of-web-app-deployment/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wpietri</author><text>As another old-school type, I really enjoy this rant. And my understanding is that the piece of software in question is a nest of snakes, so I can well believe that there is no good way to install it, only bad ways and worse ways.&lt;p&gt;But having tried out Docker for some production deployments, I think that it (or some less goofy successor) is the way forward. You get a sealed box with all the necessary dependencies, and the box has just enough holes poked in it that you can connect up the bits you care about. It turns apps into appliances, not things you need expert craftspeople to lovingly install.&lt;p&gt;As much as I have enjoyed 25 years of doing everything on an OS whose conceptual model is a 70s university department minicomputer, this era is coming to a close. We already know it&amp;#x27;s a poor match for existing hardware and use cases because we now mostly run it in virtual servers. But &amp;quot;virtual server&amp;quot; is the new &amp;quot;horseless carriage&amp;quot;. It&amp;#x27;s a phrase that tells us we are living in a future we don&amp;#x27;t yet fully understand.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nicklaf</author><text>&lt;i&gt;As much as I have enjoyed 25 years of doing everything on an OS whose conceptual model is a 70s university department minicomputer, this era is coming to a close. We already know it&amp;#x27;s a poor match for existing hardware and use cases because we now mostly run it in virtual servers. But &amp;quot;virtual server&amp;quot; is the new &amp;quot;horseless carriage&amp;quot;. It&amp;#x27;s a phrase that tells us we are living in a future we don&amp;#x27;t yet fully understand.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mirage.io&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mirage.io&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;ll need to learn OCaml (though in my mind, that&amp;#x27;s actually a major plus).&lt;p&gt;Caveat emptor: AFAIK, MirageOS is still undergoing heavy development.  That said, I believe it is essentially functional at this point (pun not intended).</text></comment>