[spydum]

I think Docker/containers make perfect sense in that they make portable software you can ship around. The catch is: you have to really understand how the sausage is made to reason about building a proper container. Most people simply don’t really know what they are doing - they simply bash keys until it works. so the challenge of building new container images is usually more work for developers. The person who was really proficient, this barely affects their day to day productivity - it just makes life easier when they go to distribute their app (or hand off to other teams).

[blr246]

Wholeheartedly agree. There are so many powerful development and debugging tools that are easy to configure in a standard IDE outside of a container environment. Docker is an excellent packaging and deployment tool. During more than 3 years of use, I've rarely encountered runtime issues caused by differences between my host and the container environment (they occur periodically when using libs for things like image processing). So long as you have logging and other service monitoring configured so you never have to deal with SSH and attaching to containers, you seldom have to think about Docker and you have a system ready to deploy in a variety of environments.

It's also great to use Docker to run test databases and other tools locally. For example, we have a script that takes a DDL file, spins up a fresh Postgres in an ephemeral Docker container, then runs SchemaCrawler on the database from yet another container to generate a useful entity-relationship diagram. The tool is portable and repeatable and carries no risk of affecting a production system.