The UX for people using Dockerfile is Halloween-style scary: banner all over the place with NO info on Docker deployments:

Sorry for the multiple messages, but I find the situation very confusing.

Would love some input on this as well.

Let's hope they reply soon.. IMO many users of now.sh are using Docker.. as it was marketed as a flagship feature

I apologize for the "aggressiveness" of the warnings/banners – they give a wrong impression.

To clarify a bit: we have no intention of shutting Now v1 down any soon. We will only start thinking about deprecation plans once we are able to accommodate the most common and critical use cases of v1 on v2. We'll be writing a lot more on the upgrade path, on how to adapt different use cases to the lambda world and so on.

Thanks for the reply. Any motivations regarding "not" supporting Docker in v2 (right away), I'm curious.

I'm far from being a dev op specialist.. I'm really wondering.

This is rather unfortunate. It sounds like the writing is on the wall here... Docker support is going away and everything is moving to a Lambda based model. This seems too prescriptive to me... For ex, an express application to either:

- be fully wrapped in a Lambda (would anyone really do this in production?)

or

- have each route converted to a lambda (what's the story around shared middleware here, seems like a lot of new overhead is introduced)

Not to mention all the other use cases that don't fit in Lambda. :/

my original question is not answered. I have zero motivation to migrate from dockerfiles to the 'builder' abstraction mentioned in today's announcement. It would be appreciated if you gave users a transparent answer so they can plan accordingly.

@peters

yes, ultimately we do plan to remove Docker support. We thought a lot about containers for the past 3 years, analyzed thousands of use cases and spoke with thousands of customers, and we concluded that functions/lambdas are superior to containers for the vast majority of workloads.

We're already writing a blogpost with more details on our thinking, reasoning and conclusions 👍

I'm very interested to hear the proposed solution for loops/jobs that is hinted at in the new Now v2 docs. It's hard for me to judge this new direction until "the rest" of the features are released. I would be open to the idea of refactoring my projects into this new approach but will have to wait and stay on v1 for now.

@ben-stocks

you're not alone – we have multiple workloads on Now v1 that rely on cronjobs :)

That's what I mean above with the fact that there's absolutely no rush to upgrade: we will only start thinking about deprecating v1 once we have a clear path for the most common and critical usecases that we see on v1. We already have something in mind for cronjobs and we believe it's going to be very nice.

Once again, I apologize for how aggressive/blunt the warnings/banners are. It wasn't our intention to make it sounds like we're going to shut v1 down any soon or that it's considered a "legacy" system – it's not!

My beef with serverless is vendor lock-in, I am forced to change my application, install sdk or configs to be able to use Zeit/Azure/AWS, Dockerfiles + HTTP was 100% portable. I see serverless/function as a service as an optimization for high frequency stuff, but a lot of businesses (SMBs) still need automation around deployments, IMO the reason Zeit's now got popular in the first place was first-class Docker support with minimal config and 0 code change

I want to second the issue of vendor lock-in. I love now because I can just throw a simple node process or a docker file for more sofisticated use cases at it and it will run. But I can just as easily run it anywhere else that runs node or docker. An application built for the v2 can be run only on now v2 with the proprietary builds and routing and only until the paradigme gets changed again in v3.

@chrillo

plus you get a managed CDN on top of it that respects Cache headers, that was a big plus for me

I usually use vanialla cloudflare which in it self is proprietary but could be swapped with any other cdn and gives me more control than the now integration. Having burned myself with parse.com back in the day I avoid proprietary stuff which I can not easily substitute like the plague

Hm, a use case I ran into last week seems like it would be much more difficult in v2: Generating pdfs dynamically using puppeteer. Forking pptraas.com and applying some customizations means we get an easy-to-deploy docker instance with simple upstream updates that is pretty much click-to-deploy on v1 (or anywhere else).

I might give DigitalOcean One-Click Docker deploy a try...

These v2 changes effectively make any Python development useless, may as well remove Python in the examples. This is a big step from generic dev to purely web dev. Why abondon the severless docker work annoucned in August ?

I'm genuinely interested in seeing where this goes. I was preparing to build a product with Elixir/Absinthe using the Docker support of v1, but to be totally honest, this announcement gave me a bit of a reality check with regards to my infrastructure decisions. I think that Zeit is totally correct in its reasoning why lambdas are better — but I'm a little disappointed that I might not be able to take what makes me happy today into the future on Zeit's platform.