No the correct solution is to debug the issue not just reboot/restart/reinit the damn thing.

This mentality is WHY Linux/docker/containers/Linux worlds NIH syndrome, is such a tire fire.

It's not one or the other. Restarting might save you some downtime if you're running a single IRC container. That doesn't mean you shouldn't find and resolve the root issue. Normally I just rollback to the previous version container if I have a recurring issue.

Windows containers are now available, if you can't stand linux: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowsconta...

Anyway, don't use containers if you don't want to. I'm glad I invested the time since I understand them very well and use them to my advantage. But I did have to learn a lot and experiment with a bunch of tools, and maybe that's not worth it to you.

As someone said, this is the normal behavior in the Erlang/Elixir world, and it seems to have worked extremely well for the telecom industry.

That said, my reply was to someone running an IRC server, presumably on a single server, so don't stretch my advice to a production app handling millions of transactions. Obviously the core issue is that the app crashes, and it's still up to him to fix that. This is almost certainly a problem with his app/config, not Docker itself (though it ain't perfect). If it's something that happens every 6 months, then auto restarting will probably save him a lot of problems. If your transactions are so precious, don't pass the flag- it's up to you.

Isn't this the much-lauded and respected Erlang approach to failures?

I never used Erlang, so I have no idea if it follows the same approach(although I find it quite strange). But for sure I can't afford to deploy anything like that in prod. You lose one transaction in the middle and several millions go lost. I'd rather lose an hand than try to explain my clients that it is fine, docker just restarted by itself as expected..