macOS Needs to Admit Containers are a THING.

RemebersOnly writes...

I work for a medium sized software company, I will leave their  name out of it. Management has recently decided that the docker-desktop tax is too high and no longer wants to pay for licenses. This has sent teams scrambling. While solutions like podman might be an option switching complicated long running developer workflow from docker/docker-compose is not trivial. We've looked at options like rancher and minikube. Those systems seem nice for locally mimicking k8s, but don't really feel like as nice of a fit for local building and debugging. There is a lot of complexity to those tools  that aren't needed and they feel very geared towards executing built images rather than building images from local state.

Our company is largely on Mac. My team, however is slight majority Linux. For us Linux user it isn't a problem. It was also interesting to learn that it's not a problem for the handful of windows devs we have because they run docker under WSL.

This is really only a problem for devs using Mac. It makes me wonder if this will be a broader issue as companies tighten their belts. Is this just a problem for Docker Inc, or will this have spill over effects for Cupertino?

I wonder if Apple has considered making the kernel changes necessary to enable Linux style containerization or providing some kind of virtualization layer like WSL.