[jacques_chester]

I work at Pivotal, so I'm partial to Cloud Foundry.

My workflow for deploying a new app for my own projects is to cd into the source directory and type

    cf push

After a while I get tired of that, so I set up a Concourse pipeline and let it type `cf push` on my behalf, after going through the testing pipeline.

Interestingly, I used to be much more bullish on moving from the buildpacks model to a container model a la everyone else in the PaaS space. To the point that I presented a case internally that buildpacks should essentially be pushed aside in favour of that model.

But once I started actually writing Dockerfiles I changed my mind. It's a bloody inconvenience. Composition is not really A Thing in Docker, you can only stack. For all the talk about elegance (and it's elegant as an implementation), you're left with what is essentially a single inheritance hierarchy with no clean way to compose containers.

The ability to get your app running immediately is something Heroku pioneered and Cloud Foundry continued (although, OK, if you insist on hurting yourself that way, you can push docker images too). Once you hand off the frankly boring business of automatically building a container to the platform, containers as the unit-of-deployment lose all of their magic.

But again. I'm biased. I've only seen both alternatives up close in my day job and in my personal projects.