zlacker

[return to "Nitro: A tiny but flexible init system and process supervisor"]
1. andrew+Dj[view] [source] 2025-08-22 20:59:59
>>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.

◧◩
2. mikepu+Oo[view] [source] 2025-08-22 21:31:20
>>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.

◧◩◪
3. palata+4t[view] [source] 2025-08-22 21:55:09
>>mikepu+Oo
My experience in the robotics space is that containers are a way to not know how to put a system together properly. It's the quick equivalent of "I install it on my Ubuntu, then I clone my whole system into a .iso and I call that a distribution". Most of the time distributed without any consideration for the open source licences being part of it.
◧◩◪◨
4. petre+qA2[view] [source] 2025-08-23 19:30:37
>>palata+4t
Except when you need a different version of postgresql than the one packaged by Ubuntu, you have to use ppas or something even more horrific: snaps. Otherwise you just put your stuff in a container, problem solved. I'm not for containerizing everything, it just adds useless complexity. But it's a useful tool.
◧◩◪◨⬒
5. palata+1I2[view] [source] 2025-08-23 20:38:07
>>petre+qA2
I guess my point was that if one is serious about shipping a system on a robot, one doesn't use Ubuntu :-).

But sure, it's easier to throw everything in a container and that's why people do it.

[go to top]