Docker recap

I last seriously used Docker for the WWF Endangered Emoji campaign and the Happy Studio global rollout both were 2015 projects and alot’s changed since then.

I’ve done some reading and here’s a short summary of the story as I see it:

• Containers become standards based. The introduction of the Open Container Initiative OCI and runC in 2015.
• The Linux kernel gets cgroups v2 and Containerd arrives 2016
• The Moby project and Docker CE are launched in 2017 by which time there is already a large and growing number of container related project.
• Red Hat made changes to Fedora 31 in 2019 that kind of broke things for Docker on Fedora but improved things for Podman.

Fast forward to 2023 where Docker would like you to do all your development using Docker Desktop because that’s their business model and other vendors like RedHat support a container ecosystem that’s built around cgroups v2 and OCI Containers using Podman as the drop-in replacement for Docker.

Installing Docker on Fedora

The Fedora 37 Workstation I’m using doesn’t come with docker installed, so if you want to use docker it needs to be installed. The alternative is to use podman, but for now I’m installing docker. The options for installing docker on Fedora are:

• Docker Desktop for Linux
• Docker Engine
• Docker Community Edition

I don’t want to install Docker Desktop because it’s heavy weight, commercial and much more than I need. On closer examination, Docker Engine and Docker Community Edition are the same thing just with different names (the instructions for installing Docker Engine are basically the same as for installing Docker CE with the addition of installing the docker-compose-plugin).

So I followed the instructions for installing Docker Engine/Docker CE for Fedora and started running docker commands. However, each time I want to run docker I need to also use sudo and that starts to get annoying. I think I’ll try out podman one of these days to see how that goes.