Add comparison to Development Containers

[silopolis]

• What

  Geodesic has some shared concepts to Development Containers like building a consistent, reproducible, shareable dev/ops environment.

• Why

  It might help to explain how choosing Geodesic differs from building and using a similar container using dev container.

• References

  https://containers.dev/

[Nuru]

@silopolis Thank you for your interest in Geodesic.

Many of the changes in Geodesic v4 (versus v3) are there in support of being able to use Geodesic as a Development Container more easily. I encourage you to try out the v4 release candidate and make comments on #961 if you find issues with it. Unfortunately we do not have instructions on how to use it as a Development Container because everyone does things a little differently, but hopefully it is not too hard to figure out.

The main difference between Geodesic and a generic Development Container is that the latter essentially requires you to use an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) like VS Code or IntelliJ, while Geodesic was designed from the beginning to be used as a standalone tool. Additionally, Geodesic supports the use of Atmos to manage multiple deployment configurations on top of Terraform/OpenTofu, and is generally meant to be used via the command line. When launched, the current working directory is mounted (read/write) into the container, so you can edit source from within the container or from the host while developing it.

I don't use Development Containers, so I don't have a full grasp on how or why they are used. We would appreciate help from people who are using Development Containers to answer your question more fully and give us feedback on what, if anything, we could be doing to provide better support.