Re:Thoughts on a Container Native Package System
by jbeda on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @05:07PM
(#9815166)
I think this is really orthogonal. Puppet/Chef/Ansible/Salt all help to configure an environment and work with the native package manager for the OS. What I'm suggesting here is to instead create a new package manager that is native to the container world and is used at build time.
There is still a need for an improved tool set to build the containers and use this package manager. Perhaps these tools could expand into that area.
As for long-running processes -- I'd consider that an anti-pattern. If there is a critical bug, the correct thing to do would be to build a new (versioned) image and restart (either blue/green or a rolling update) to that new image. This also enables rollback if your fix breaks things further.
This would give you the semantic representation you're looking for, idempotency, and a prebuilt library of reusable components that you could leverage going forward.
In addition, it could also handle the case where you have a long-running process in a container and suddenly there's a critical severity bug that you need to patch.