[e40]

Say you're running on CentOS 6.6 (or the equivalent RHEL) and you want to run some software that won't work because you need a newer library than is installed (this recently happened to me recently trying to install Transmission).

You have two choices:

1. Upgrade to CentOS 7.x.

2. Use Docker and install the software into a container using a newer OS (CentOS 7.x or a newer Debian).

#1 is very expensive and sometimes impossible (if you need to be on CentOS 6.x for compatibility reasons).

#2 is very cheap.

There's one of your business cases right there.

[ecliptik]

This is our current business case. Multiple CentOS/RHEL 6 systems in a global environment and we want to run an application that requires Ubuntu and newer libraries.

Instead of spinning up new VMs in each environment for one new application, we can instead run a Ubuntu container with the application within the existing environment. This brings with it all the other benefits such as continuous delivery and orchestration that we didn't have before.

Once the platform is established there is no limit what we can run within a repeatable and consistent environment.

[rlpb]

Isn't that a business case for containers, rather than Docker specifically? If you want to install an entire OS into a container, LXD is more suitable, surely?