Even in a shop with just Linux and mac, I think docker (especially deployed via fargate) causes way more problems than it solve. We have a single instance of a single app that used to run just fine in a Ubuntu vm. Now it runs in fargate. We waste huge time futzing with the image size due to fargate insane 8gb limit. We wast huge time working around not being able to get a shell when something goes wrong.

Local development also sucks. The docker engine is essentially unusable on my colleagues Mac, consuming 100%+ of all available cpu while sitting idle. On my Linux box, either docker breaks my networking, or IT firewall rules break dockers networking. It’s even worse with wfh, because our vpn is incomparable with docker. Local dev just happens in an anaconda env instead. So what’s the point?

VMs have none of these problems. Docker is the leakiest abstraction I’ve yet to come across.