A Surface Roadblock

This is a continuation of my previous posts, the last one being More Surface Book

Damnit Docker.

There is Docker for Windows, but there’s no docker CLI in the WSL environment. This might be a problem because we’re shifting more and more to using docker to deploy all our services. As the CTO I am occasionally required to actually like, edit services and run them on my machine. So this might be a big blocker. Certainly I can install an Ubuntu VM, but a big part of the point of all this is to avoid having to use a VM. I’m going to think about this one a bit, and even try the VM (with HyperV too, why not), but this might be the biggest reason to stick with Apple for now.

Wow ok. Docker for Windows works by using Hyper-V. Hyper-V is Microsoft’s virtualization technology. When it’s installed it locks out all other virtualization technology, so like you can’t run VirtualBox and Hyper-V simultaneously and expect VB to get any kind of hardware virtualization acceleration. So if I want to run a Ubuntu VM for dev work in the background and still try to get Docker in Windows running then I have to have it in Hyper-V.

That’s probably not a terrible thing except that HyperV doesn’t seem to have some of the nice things I take for granted with VirtualBox, at least not without more digging. Like a NAT’d IP for my VM so that I can always assume it’s at some internal IP.

If I do run the VM I’ll either have to use the (pretty crappy) virtual desktop to get around the VIM ConEmu limitations or I’ll have to deal with ConEmu regardless. Starting to seem less and less worth it.

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