[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.