Docker-style containers only shield you from mixed-library situations eg. where one "service" needs version A and another needs version B. It's painful because this situation is entirely accidental and could be trivially solved by linking everything statically. Then once you have two or more containers up and running, these libraries still need security updates and other fixes which is the entire point of shared libs in the first place. Basically, Docker is not a solution but part of the problem. But with Docker comes a ton of constraints; for example, basic file access and anything related to permissions is a PITA. And you need overreaching orchestration software such as mesos/marathon, k8s, or openshift. It's not that these tools are bad, but rather that they're nuclear weapons for relative little benefit, requiring expensive devops experts. All so you can pack multiple services on a single physical host (which would be much easier using classical service runtimes), and so your HTTP services (because everything has to be HTTP because of the firewalls) can all listen on virtual port 80/8080.