zlacker

>>todsac+(OP)
I'm always torn when I see anything mentioning running an init system in a container. On one hand, I guess it's good that it's designed with that use case in mind. Mainly, though, I've just seen too many overly complicated things attempted (on greenfield even) inside a single container when they should have instead been designed for kubernetes/cloud/whatever-they-run-on directly and more properly decoupled.

It's probably just one of those "people are going to do it anyway" things. But I'm not sure if it's better to "do it better" and risk spreading the problem, or leave people with older solutions that fail harder.

>>andrew+Dj
From my experience in the robotics space, a lot of containers start life as "this used to be a bare metal thing and then we moved it into a container", and with a lot of unstructured RPC going on between processes, there's little benefit in breaking up the processes into separate containers.

Supervisor, runit, systemd, even a tmux session are all popular options for how to run a bunch of stuff in a monolithic "app" container.

>>mikepu+Oo
tmux?! Please share your war stories.

>>sho_hn+Ft
Not my favoured approach, but for early stage systems where proper off-board observability/alerting is not yet in place, tmux can function as a kind of ssh-accessible dashboard displaying the stdout of key running processes, and also allowing some measure of inline recovery— like if a process has crashed, you can up-arrow and relaunch it in the same environment it crashed out of.

Obviously not an approach that scales, but I think it can also work decently well as a dev environment, where you want to run "stock" for most of the components in the system, and just be syncing in an updated workspace and restarting the one bit being actively developed on. Being able to do this without having to reason about a whole tree of interlinked startup units or whatever does lower the barrier to entry somewhat.

>>mikepu+ow
One advantage is that if the process has some sort of console on it's stdin, you can do admin work easily. With init systems you now have to configure named pipes, worry about them blocking, have output in separate place, etc.