Rancher Desktop, a Docker Desktop Replacement

Re:Rancher Desktop, a Docker Desktop Replacement by xpressvideoz on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @01:28AM (#28836391)

I was amazed by the news at first, but seeing it again, it doesn't seem to be a direct replacement of Docker Desktop. It makes use of K3s under the hood, which is lighter than a full-blown Kubernetes, but still quite heavy. My nearly empty K3s cluster is consistently consuming ~10% CPU time on my local machine. This is not acceptable to me, so a proper replacement of Docker Desktop should be more lightweight.

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Re:Rancher Desktop, a Docker Desktop Replacement by GordonS on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @04:53AM (#28837540)

Ach, the title seems to be mis-selling it.

Docker Desktop is all about Docker, Compose and Swarm, and has Kubernetes functionality built on top as an extra. Rancher Desktop seems to be all about Kubernetes - can it even run standalone Docker containers, or Compose/Swarm services?

EDIT: answering my own question - I checked the nerdctl GitHub page, and it states that not only is Swarm not supported, but it will not be. So Rancher Desktop is unfortunately not a drop-in Docker Desktop replacement for everyone :(

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Re:Rancher Desktop, a Docker Desktop Replacement by chupasaurus on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @08:32AM (#28838877)

Swarm is a cluster solution made on top of Compose so it isn't useful on a local machine.

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Re:Rancher Desktop, a Docker Desktop Replacement by GordonS on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @10:32AM (#28840169)

It's very useful on a local machine if you're using Swarm in production, as Swarm supports some additional things that Compose doesn't.

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Re:Rancher Desktop, a Docker Desktop Replacement by chupasaurus on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @02:37PM (#28843365)

The differences are:

- Replicas: could be made with YAML templating

- Update/rollback policies other than stop-first, very useful on a local machine?

- Resource limits: stayed in v2 to sell Swarm, although there's cgroup_parent which has to be created manually

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Re:Rancher Desktop, a Docker Desktop Replacement by GordonS on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @03:09PM (#28843790)

There are yet more differences.

For example, Swarm supports `configs`, while Compose does not - and I use `configs`, and would much rather not have to have separate service definitions for dev and prod to work around such insufficiencies.

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Re:Rancher Desktop, a Docker Desktop Replacement by rvdmei on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @02:08AM (#28836596)

It also comes with nerdctl (docker compatible cli). It interacts with containerd directly and is a drop-in replacement for docker cli.

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Re:Rancher Desktop, a Docker Desktop Replacement by xpressvideoz on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @02:19AM (#28836644)

Oh that's nice, would it be possible to run containerd only, without running any Kubernetes controllers? I suspect the controllers are the root cause of the huge resource consumption, because they are constantly checking for the system components and trying to reconcile them.

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Re:Rancher Desktop, a Docker Desktop Replacement by chucky_z on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @02:45AM (#28836800)

Yep! If you’re on MacOS check out Lima, it’s a project by Akihiro Suda who is one of the main contributors to nerdctl (and the original author iirc)

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Re:Rancher Desktop, a Docker Desktop Replacement by rvdmei on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @04:56AM (#28837553)

Rancher Desktop macOS version is based on Lima.

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