[exelius]

A lot of these articles are correct. I would agree that Docker probably isn't ready for production. But containers provide a TON of benefits, and you should absolutely be thinking about how to containerize your applications now. Just because it's not currently ready for production doesn't mean you shouldn't start getting ready to move to a container solution. The ecosystem will mature, companies will offer solutions for these problems, and it will eventually be ready for production. When it is ready, you should be too.

The big problem that Docker solves is the dependency problem. Specifically, it ties multiple levels of dependencies together with application code in a way that makes no assumptions about your environment and how well-maintained it is. It means that your CI system can test on the exact same versions of binaries -- and every dependency down to the kernel level -- that you will run on your production systems.

Many bigger companies will have multiple Yum/Apt/Maven/Git repositories, and with Docker, it doesn't matter. Whatever is built into the container is what gets run. Most importantly it puts control of those things into the hands of the development team, not the system administration team. It allows you to more cleanly separate your infrastructure ops from your application engineering/devops, which is the prime benefit IMO because those two groups have never worked together well.