Ask HN: How common is banning Docker?
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The offshore team had to access everything via virtual desktops, and one of the restrictions was no virtualisation within the virtual desktop - so tooling like Docker was banned.
I was really surprsied to see modern JVM development going on, without access to things like TestContainers, LocalStack, or Docker at all.
To compound matters, they had a single shared dev env, (for cost reasons), so the team were constantly breaking each others stuff.
How common is this? Also, curious what kinds of workarounds people are using?
The author describes a restrictive development environment at a bank where Docker was banned, and asks how common such restrictions are and what workarounds others are using.
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VDI VM in VM often not ideal aswell,
Docker is paid per seat monthly subscription for commercial usages
The onshore team were able to use Docker, but not offshore.
It's fine, many large orgs are like this.
Having worked for a bank I will add my jaded opinion. Throw logic out of the window. Banks have their own regulations, history and internal policies. Finding a job is hard right now so one may have to grin and just accept it. Don't think too much about it.
Ask them if you can use VMWare or VirtualBox in the virtual desktop and get a VMWare license assigned to you. It's clunky but something they might actually have and may save some headaches. If this is an option ask them which Linux ISO is permitted and where it is.
How common is this?
Very common for a bank especially for offshore or remote employees.
Also, curious what kinds of workarounds people are using?
Nobody outside of the bank will like this answer. Ask them what work around is permitted within the policy. If your questions are always without emotion and always centered around policy they may grow to like you and with time you may earn more trust than others making your job just a little easier.
I've finished up there now, so this is purely retrospective.
For them - the workaround (sadly) was -- a lack of testing.
I was really surprised that in a heavily regulated environment (this project faced off to a regulator) Integration testing (which has gotten really easy on the JVM thanks to stuff like TestContainers) just didn't exist.
That could be symptom of a broader lack of a test-driven culture though.
For specific stories. We had Windows virtual desktops. Our unit test suites assume an Unix environment like the employees Macs or Jenkins, so we had to coax Jenkins to run our feature branches and there may be 12 hour waits for our builds. We also had to plan leaves around their quarterly plans and hard deadlines while they they never treated quarterly plans as deadlines or cycles. Debugging with client is affected by timezone differences too.
Disclaimer: I work for the parent company
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