This is a “techie” article/rant, so if you’re reading this and not into technology, I suggest you move on. Much of what I’m posting about requires explanation anyway, and doing so would make this article so much longer…

I’ve become interested in Docker recently as the result of a number of customer questions. Docker is a way to “containerize” applications. It’s similar to virtual machines, except VMs deploy a guest operating system inside their silo, whereas containers leverage the host OS directly.

Hearing that one of my colleagues had done some preliminary work in “containerizing” our company’s product, I wanted to see it running “natively” on my Mac. Docker Desktop for Mac is free, so I downloaded and installed it. The next step was fetching (called “pulling”) the app from a Docker online repository, which worked like a charm. Once running, I pointed my (Google Chrome) browser to the URL specified by Docker on my laptop, and voilà!

Good stuff.

So, the next thing I wanted to do was to install Docker and our app on a Windows machine. Since the program has no native Mac binaries, our customers are all Windows or Linux users. I wanted to perform more of a real-world test.

That’s where the problems began. On my office computer, Docker downloaded, installed, and ran the sample programs used by online bloggers and sources (“hello-world, busybox). But when it came to running our product, Docker threw errors, complaining that ports needed didn’t have the proper permissions. Ugh.

At home that evening, I decided to install Docker on a Windows laptop I had purchased as a “sandbox” machine (expressly for the purpose of experimenting with Windows apps). This was even worse. Docker wouldn’t start, claiming that resources I needed had to be enabled. I spent the better part of a day turning on and turning off BIOS settings, Windows Hyper-V and growing frustrated by the hour.

Back in my office, I thought I’d try some remedial experiments, along with the help (?) and advice (?) of the online community. Most of what I found was old and did not address the current release of Docker. Still, all kinds of problems and suggested solutions abound at the click of a Google search…

I’m taking a break. If I want to experiment with Docker, I’m turning to my Mac. Docker on Windows is, for me, a deal-killer right now.