Comment by St-Clock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by St-Clock | Hacker News Reader

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I have yet to see real, complex, and distributed applications that share the exact same config in dev and production. I know that having the same versions of system libs in dev and prod can be a problem in some context and docker can help with that, but it's not the only solution and does not take care of the whole landscape (e.g., npm packages.json, pip requirements.txt, etc.).

I totally agree that startup time of a container is far less than a VM, but I don't see how docker "removes all the trouble of running applications that you need for your development: databases, application servers, queues"

You still need to install, configure these services, make sure that the containers can talk to each other in a reliable and secure way, etc.

First, I'm a dilettante. I haven't used docker in production. I've really only set up a handful of containers.

That said, all of those fiddly library dependencies are where i struggle the most at work. If i could just build a docker image and hand that off, it would save me a lot of grief with regard to getting deployment machines just right.

I do have a great deal of experience with legacy environments, and it seems like the only way to actually solve problems is to run as much as possible on my machine. Lowering that overhead would be valuable. Debugging simple database interaction is fine on a shared dev machine. a weblogic server that updates oracle that's polled by some random server that kicks of a shell script... ugh. Even worse when you can't log into those machines and inspect what a dev did years ago.

If you've got a clean environment, there's probably not as much value to you.

I hear you about legacy systems. Two years ago, I had to support a Python 2.4 system that used a deprecated crypto c library and I did not want to "pollute" my clean production infrastructure. Containers would definitively help with this scenario. The thought never occurred to me that docker could be used to reproduce/encapsulate legacy systems, thanks!

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