Ask HN: What's your container story?

[shrineOfLies]

I'm doing my research project on containers, their usefulness and pain points. I greatly appreciate anyone who wishes to share their container story with me :) 1. Do you use or wish to you containers in your company? If so, How many containers do you run in production?

2. What kinds of jobs are running on your container deployment (analytics?, batch processing, CI/CD)?

3. How big is your company(employees, revenue, users)? and what field is it in (mobile, AI)?

4. Do you use any orchestrators/special tools (kubernetes/docker swarm)?

5. What is the biggest challenge in using containers for you?

[trcollinson]

I actually really love containers so I will bite on this:

1) We use containers all over our process. From local development to production. In production we run in AWS ECS Service clusters with 9 containers per cluster. These are mostly rails servers and nginx reverse proxy's.

2) We run rails servers, nginx reverse proxy's, CI/CD uses containers, we have jobs for data processing that use containers. Probably other things too.

3) Things :D

4) Yes and no. We don't use orchestration tools but we do have orchestration using customer rake tests and deep integration with our CI/CD environment.

5) It's hard to hug a container... that's the biggest challenge.

[diogok]

Happy container user here. At previous company:

1. Using containers, close to 20 of them in production. Same for homolog, and a few at a time for dev;

2. Everything: Database (CouchDB+ES), Apps(in PHP, Ruby and Clojure) and auxiliary stuff(proxy, wiki, static server, mailer...);

3. Small: 2 techs, 1k users. Biodiversity conservation in the government;

4. No orchestrators. Using docker-compose only;

5. On boarding new members that are not experienced, sometimes takes a while for the abstraction to "kick in";

[barrystaes]

No details but some insights; 1) We now use 0 containers in production, only in dev/test env. 2) One docker per background service, for now. 4) docker CLI for now, later some GitLab CI tests 5) My Windows workstation.

Thing i want to add on usefulness: To me containers are mostly a way to abstract configuration and document it in code. Lots of server processes go into a cloud, and this can help us iterate faster in the future.

[gtirloni]

If you search for "state containers 2016", you'll get more data.