Gimme That Foot Gun

The past couple of days I wrote about the dangers of providing too much functionality. In a fit of cognitive dissonance I now want to contradict myself and demand dangerous power when it suits my needs.

I’ve been working the past week to get a particularly gnarly application running in a set of docker containers. There are over a dozen services, plus a Rabbit queue and a database. Many of the services do not handle database connection failures in a robust way. During my testing I wanted a simple way to ensure they waited a bit before trying to connect, as the database container needs a minute or so to seed itself and get ready for connections.

Unfortunately,docker-compose does not have any form of manual startup delay feature. This is by design, as the Docker team (rightly) argues that having services intolerant to connection failure is a bad thing. However, it’s frustrating to not have the power to do the wrong thing in the short term.

Then again, it turns out it wasn’t too tough to augment my compose file with a depends_on clause that includes a health check, which is a more reliable solution anyways.