I've tried one of the preview builds as part of their Developer Preview Program[1] and it's super fast when you're running an arm64 image, as opposed to an amd64 that will automatically be run via qemu (and therefore incur some overhead). By "super fast", I mean I was seeing speeds comparable to running the commands natively on the M1 mac (npm install and a heavy Gulp build).<p>[1] - <a href="https://www.docker.com/community/get-involved/developer-preview" rel="nofollow">https://www.docker.com/community/get-involved/developer-prev...</a>
This bit about Multi-platform development is most interesting to me.<p>> Many developers are going to experience multi-platform development for the first time with the M1 Macs. This is one of the key areas where Docker shines. Docker has had support for multi-platform images for a long time, meaning that you can build and run both x86 and ARM images on Desktop today.<p>If multi platform images work, a lot of the concerns people have about x86 versus ARM should go away.<p>Of course, once you can do everything on ARM as well as you can on x86. Perhaps changing more of your infrastructure to ARM might make more sense.
Perhaps a dumb question but I'm curious why people don't use a VPS or a cloud linux machine more for Docker/K8s development instead of running Docker locally on a Mac.<p>In my experience Docker Desktop has been such a resource hog, and Apple's hypervisor implementation pretty poor. I much prefer to have all that heavy lifting isolated away from my development machine to keep it responsive and cool.
After reading the article, I still don't quite understand how this works. I've used multi-platform Docker containers before, and that makes sense to me.<p>What I don't understand is how they are running x86 containers on an ARM64 VM? Docker Desktop still works by building a Linux VM and running Docker there. But the VM would be an ARM VM. So, are they running qemu in the ARM VM to emulate an x86 processor in a nested VM?<p>I had imagined they'd try to do something like run x86 qemu through Rosetta, but it seems like this is not that. And the Apple Hypervisor Framework documentation leaves a bit to be desired, so I'm not sure if you can switch vCPU architecture, but I highly doubt it. (And I thought it was established that Rosetta wasn't emulating VM instructions).<p>Can anyone shine any light on this aspect?
I would strongly advise anyone considering running this closed-source, proprietary software on their machine to examine the large amounts of private data it uploads to Docker Inc when it crashes before they install or run it.<p>I was surprised. You might be surprised, too.<p>I was so surprised that I decided to only ever run the open source command line docker client on my machine, and to avoid any proprietary software that comes out of Docker Inc in the future. It is absolutely not reasonable for them to upload some of the data that they do, and I no longer trust their judgement about what happens on my machine.<p>If they did that sort of stuff in the open source cli app, it would be patched out in minutes.
I've been using Preview 5 for about a week now and it's worked well for me in my admittedly limited use (devilbox).<p>The Docker team is so awesome for getting this out so quickly.
The battery impact of having Docker running with a few containers seems greatly decreased on Apple Silicon. I used to be reluctant on my Intel MBP to use Docker if I was out and about - working in a cafe between meetings for example - because my battery life would shrink immensely. That doesn't seem to apply in the same way on m1 (running ARM64 containers) which is a huge win.
Wow, that was fast. I was expecting to wait unil January.<p>Key takeaway for me is the ability to run/build both x86 and Arm images on a M1.<p>Can't see any reason M1s can't be used for everyone at my work now. Very nice.
Happy to hear they are making progress, but I would caution people on being an early adopter.<p>It's a tech preview only and don't screw yourself by thinking you will be able to just jump into your usual workflow without issues.<p>Good luck docker!
Does this mean I can run containers natively on Mac? And I don't need a VirtualBox VM running on my Mac to launch containers? This would be huge for me, and is always a big in my mind why I would consider switching back to Linux.<p>Edit: Docker on Mac has never felt as snappy as on Linux, because of the VM, though I have no hard numbers. Networking is a PITA, but it's not hard to figure out. The other main thing I hate is I have to give up a bunch of RAM to the VM that my containers may or may not use, instead of sharing with the host like on Linux.
Now come on Windows! Give me a solution for that (although I rarely use it) and I’m sold<p>or maybe I moved the goal post to requiring more than 16gb RAM again<p>but come on everyone you can do it!<p>edit: guys I'm talking about running Windows on a VM on a M1 macbook. Just going down the checkbox of virtualization options. Docker is one checkbox. Now want Windows and Vmware/VirtualBox/Parallels
As much as the m1 processors are praised, I won't upgrade from my intel mac until apple fixes their OS (by default the m1 Macs will have Big Sur).<p>There's still no word on whether or not apple applications still have exceptions from being filtered by the new network apis.<p>I usually upgrade after the second or third minor patch, but im going to be holding out.
Eh, you need to apply to the Developer Preview Program. Here <a href="https://www.docker.com/community/get-involved/developer-preview" rel="nofollow">https://www.docker.com/community/get-involved/developer-prev...</a>
Absolute disaster, this platform. The opacity and lack of early availability for development made for a really ugly adoption experience. I feel that people should not encourage this and vote with their money in the DevOps / Dev sector to discourage other companies from pulling the same stunt.