Bazel vs Docker

Overview

Docker

Stacks194.2K

Followers143.8K

Votes3.9K

Bazel

Stacks313

Followers579

Votes133

Bazel vs Docker: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Bazel and Docker are both powerful tools used in software development and deployment. However, they have key differences in their functionalities and purposes. In this article, we will explore the differences between Bazel and Docker in detail.

Build Process: Bazel is primarily a build automation tool that focuses on creating reproducible and efficient builds. It uses a build graph to determine the dependencies and parallelizes the build process. On the other hand, Docker is a platform that allows developers to package their applications and dependencies into portable containers.
Isolation: Bazel provides isolation at a fine-grained level by implementing sandboxing techniques. It ensures that the build process does not have any external dependencies or side effects. Docker, on the other hand, provides a more heavyweight form of isolation by using containerization. It encapsulates an entire environment, including the application and its dependencies.
Portability: Bazel is designed to be highly portable and platform-agnostic. It can build software for various platforms and architectures without any modifications to the build configuration. Docker, on the other hand, provides a consistent execution environment by abstracting away the underlying operating system and hardware, making it easier to run applications across different platforms.
Reproducibility: Bazel emphasizes reproducibility by ensuring that the build process is hermetic and deterministic. It uses content hashing to verify that the build inputs are unchanged and produces the same outputs consistently. Docker focuses more on providing a consistent runtime environment, but it may not guarantee the exact same outputs for a given input in different environments.
Dependency Management: Bazel has sophisticated dependency management capabilities built-in. It can resolve and fetch dependencies from various sources efficiently, allowing for incremental builds. Docker, on the other hand, relies on package managers and container registries to manage dependencies within containers.
Resource Utilization: Bazel optimizes resource utilization by caching build artifacts and only rebuilding what is necessary. It can skip the build process for unchanged dependencies, resulting in faster build times. Docker, however, may require building the entire container from scratch whenever there is a change, leading to potentially longer build times.

In summary, Bazel focuses on efficient and reproducible builds with fine-grained isolation and dependency management, while Docker provides encapsulation of applications and their dependencies for easy deployment and portability.

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Advice on Docker, Bazel

Florian

IT DevOp at Agitos GmbH

Oct 22, 2019

Decided

lxd/lxc and Docker aren't congruent so this comparison needs a more detailed look; but in short I can say: the lxd-integrated administration of storage including zfs with its snapshot capabilities as well as the system container (multi-process) approach of lxc vs. the limited single-process container approach of Docker is the main reason I chose lxd over Docker.

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Detailed Comparison

Docker	Bazel
The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere	Bazel is a build tool that builds code quickly and reliably. It is used to build the majority of Google's software, and thus it has been designed to handle build problems present in Google's development environment.
Integrated developer tools; open, portable images; shareable, reusable apps; framework-aware builds; standardized templates; multi-environment support; remote registry management; simple setup for Docker and Kubernetes; certified Kubernetes; application templates; enterprise controls; secure software supply chain; industry-leading container runtime; image scanning; access controls; image signing; caching and mirroring; image lifecycle; policy-based image promotion	Multi-language support: Bazel supports Java, Objective-C and C++ out of the box, and can be extended to support arbitrary programming languages;High-level build language: Projects are described in the BUILD language, a concise text format that describes a project as sets of small interconnected libraries, binaries and tests. By contrast, with tools like Make you have to describe individual files and compiler invocations;Multi-platform support: The same tool and the same BUILD files can be used to build software for different architectures, and even different platforms. At Google, we use Bazel to build both server applications running on systems in our data centers and client apps running on mobile phones;Reproducibility: In BUILD files, each library, test, and binary must specify its direct dependencies completely. Bazel uses this dependency information to know what must be rebuilt when you make changes to a source file, and which tasks can run in parallel. This means that all builds are incremental and will always produce the same result;Scalable: Bazel can handle large builds
Statistics
Stacks 194.2K	Stacks 313
Followers 143.8K	Followers 579
Votes 3.9K	Votes 133
Pros & Cons
Pros 823 Rapid integration and build up 692 Isolation 521 Open source 505 Testability and reproducibility 460 Lightweight Cons 8 New versions == broken features 6 Documentation not always in sync 6 Unreliable networking 4 Moves quickly 3 Not Secure	Pros 28 Fast 20 Deterministic incremental builds 17 Correct 16 Multi-language 14 Enforces declared inputs/outputs Cons 3 No Windows Support 2 Bad IntelliJ support 1 Lack of Documentation 1 Learning Curve 1 Poor windows support for some languages
Integrations
Java Docker Compose VirtualBox Linux Amazon EC2 Container Service Docker Swarm boot2docker Kubernetes Docker Machine Vagrant	Java Objective-C C++

What are some alternatives to Docker, Bazel?

Apache Maven

Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects.

Gradle

Gradle is a build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language development. If you are building, testing, publishing, and deploying software on any platform, Gradle offers a flexible model that can support the entire development lifecycle from compiling and packaging code to publishing web sites.

LXD

LXD isn't a rewrite of LXC, in fact it's building on top of LXC to provide a new, better user experience. Under the hood, LXD uses LXC through liblxc and its Go binding to create and manage the containers. It's basically an alternative to LXC's tools and distribution template system with the added features that come from being controllable over the network.

Pants

Pants is a build system for Java, Scala and Python. It works particularly well for a source code repository that contains many distinct projects.

LXC

LXC is a userspace interface for the Linux kernel containment features. Through a powerful API and simple tools, it lets Linux users easily create and manage system or application containers.

JitPack

JitPack is an easy to use package repository for Gradle/Sbt and Maven projects. We build GitHub projects on demand and provides ready-to-use packages.

SBT

It is similar to Java's Maven and Ant. Its main features are: Native support for compiling Scala code and integrating with many Scala test frameworks.

rkt

Rocket is a cli for running App Containers. The goal of rocket is to be composable, secure, and fast.

Buck

Buck encourages the creation of small, reusable modules consisting of code and resources, and supports a variety of languages on many platforms.

Apache Ant

Ant is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it is kind of like Make, without Make's wrinkles and with the full portability of pure Java code.

Related Comparisons

Bazel vs Docker: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Build Process: Bazel is primarily a build automation tool that focuses on creating reproducible and efficient builds. It uses a build graph to determine the dependencies and parallelizes the build process. On the other hand, Docker is a platform that allows developers to package their applications and dependencies into portable containers.
Isolation: Bazel provides isolation at a fine-grained level by implementing sandboxing techniques. It ensures that the build process does not have any external dependencies or side effects. Docker, on the other hand, provides a more heavyweight form of isolation by using containerization. It encapsulates an entire environment, including the application and its dependencies.
Portability: Bazel is designed to be highly portable and platform-agnostic. It can build software for various platforms and architectures without any modifications to the build configuration. Docker, on the other hand, provides a consistent execution environment by abstracting away the underlying operating system and hardware, making it easier to run applications across different platforms.
Reproducibility: Bazel emphasizes reproducibility by ensuring that the build process is hermetic and deterministic. It uses content hashing to verify that the build inputs are unchanged and produces the same outputs consistently. Docker focuses more on providing a consistent runtime environment, but it may not guarantee the exact same outputs for a given input in different environments.
Dependency Management: Bazel has sophisticated dependency management capabilities built-in. It can resolve and fetch dependencies from various sources efficiently, allowing for incremental builds. Docker, on the other hand, relies on package managers and container registries to manage dependencies within containers.
Resource Utilization: Bazel optimizes resource utilization by caching build artifacts and only rebuilding what is necessary. It can skip the build process for unchanged dependencies, resulting in faster build times. Docker, however, may require building the entire container from scratch whenever there is a change, leading to potentially longer build times.

Bazel vs Docker

Overview