[knesek]

Hm. My team is running and developing a somewhat complex system based on jvm for years, and never encountered any of the issues in the bullet points. Having consistent test, staging and production environments produced by ansible have been working out for us (and is not hard). Are we just being lucky?

[sewercake]

I don’t have enough experience to say how common my experience (or yours) is, but I don’t know how much luck is involved. I’m sure many institutions have solved these problems without containers and sicker.

But For various reasons, political, personal, technical etcetera, consistent, accessible test environments were not available. It was a huge bottleneck for developers.

This is why docker was so appealing: it allowed devs to circumvent the political and technical issues. We didn’t have to justify provisioning more instances, since we could just use docker compose to run stacks on local machines.

So I’m that sense, the choice and it’s benefits arose from non technical hurdles.