I work in the public sector. We operate more than 500 systems at the muniplacity where I work. Some are major, some are not. Some have support completely handled by the providers, some do not. Some are build in house, some are bought by local software companies and developed specifically for us others again are standard software.

What’s common among them is that they run on different technology.

So we have 500 different ways to do front-ends, middle-ware, back-ends and databases. So literally thousands of combinations.

We have 5 IT-operations staff to run and maintain it. They’re very good, but they are very good at specific things. Like one guy knows networking, another knows server infrastructure and user management, but only for Microsoft products because that’s our backbone.

But we’d like to run a JBOSS server on redhat, and we’d like to run some Django and Flask servers, and we’d like to have a PostgreSQL and a MongoDB for GIS, a MySQL for some of the cheap open source stuff and a MSSQL for most things. And so on.

Guess what makes that easy, docker for Windows. Our IT staff can’t support all those techs, but they can deploy and maintain containers and keep surveillance on them. Sure the content of the containers is up to the developers, but it’s infinitely easier to operate than having to support the infrastructure to do it without docker.

The same thing is less true in Azure or AWS where your cloud provider can act similarly to containers, with web-apps and serverless, but it’s still nice to keep things in containers in case you need to vacate the cloud for whatever reason.