[tyingq]

One I've seen is less technical, and more organizational. Once it's in docker, the development team now owns things like the jvm version, command line parameters (thread pool settings, gc settings, etc). Lacking that, in some large companies, some other team has control of your environment. Silly, yes, but that is one of the bigger motivators I've seen for docker use at big companies...clawing back control.

[falcolas]

This is both good and bad. Good for developers who can control more, bad for sysadmins who have to force JVM updates to address security vulnerabilities and inefficient settings (hello world pre-allocating 10 gigs of memory).

[gutnor]

Most likely, organisation that needs this kind of workaround do not have sysadmin that monitor or track JVM updates. They just have inflexible process guardian with a 2 week lead time and at least 1 man-week worth of effort on a specific budget code. Of course the only source of change request would be the developers themselves.

I have seen organisation devolve like that on the database side. At one time you have a DBA team monitoring server, planning for capacity, upgrade, optimising script and owning datamodel. A few years of cost cutting and 3 guys own the datamodel of tens of application, over hundreds of servers, basically becoming a huge bottleneck for the 300+ developers. When adding a column is eating half of your project budgets and adding uncertainty on delivery date, developers become creative. The best of them sneak a way to get DBA access, the others multiplex value in existing columns (Hello, "PROPERTIES" xml column !)

[tyingq]

It'll come full circle soon enough. Some PHB will centralize the developers that deal with docker, and we'll start over.

In the early days of Unix, there weren't sysadmins really...just one or two devs on each team that dealt with it. They were later centralized, and...seen this cycle before.