[benjaminwootton]

"However, for many production users today, the pros do not outweigh the cons. Docker has done fantastically well at making containers appeal to developers for development, testing and CI environments—however, it has yet to disrupt production."

I keep hearing about people putting Docker in dev and test environments and not production. This use case makes no sense to me as you would throw away the entire point of containers and have a wildly inconsistent path to production.

[superuser2]

Not necessarily. If you're in a microservice architecture, it can be very attractive to "docker run" all the services you're developing against on your development VM.

Relying on Puppet (as with prod) means development VM setup/change time is measured in hours. My company's Puppet catalog takes 15 minutes to compile, 6 hours to run. Entire days of developer productivity are lost trying to get development VMs working. Docker would make that instantaneous. It's also very hard to manage and synchronize data (i.e. test fixtures) across all those services. With Docker you could have a consistent set of data in the actual images and revert to it at will.

[spinningarrow]

Does anyone have any good links to using Docker for development?

Even a simple `npm install` in a docker container fails on Windows because of the lack of support symlinks (adding --no-bin-links means npm's run scripts can't be used to their full and useful extent).

[jamesRaybould]

We are looking at using Docker to help make our dev environments a little bit more sane. We deploy to Heroku so we use the Heroku docker image to give us (what is hopefully) as close to production environment in dev as possible. I have got docker working in a proof of concept project but the performance on OSX when using volumes, so you can actually dev on it, pretty terrible.