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What is Docker? Why is it important and necessary for developers? Part II

Oleksandr Simonov on March 12, 2020

In the first part of the article, we examined the concept of containerization, looked at the difference between LXC and Docker, and also what else ...
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Paweł Kowalski • Edited

I can answer to question from title: It is not necessary at all.

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Oleksandr Simonov

If you do not care about the quality and repeatability of the environment - yes, it's not necessary. Or you 10 years working with one code base and working with legacy code.

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Paweł Kowalski

Well, dockers doesnt guarantee any of that. When i asked our devops about why my env is so different than his, he said that docker is not about that. I didnt ask what its for, but i waste a lot of time on it and i remember times when i didnt have to.

PS. Quality and repeatability of environment is easily achivable without containers in any shape or form.

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Oleksandr Simonov

The differences are big. You running code locally on mac os, but production runs on Linux. Different versions of libraries, toolchains, etc. The only way to avoid this thing - run in same environment. Even if you use a Vagrant you still running in totally different environments. Only containers can provide possibility to run the same environment locally and in production.

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Paweł Kowalski

If you have very simple app, then maybe they are the same.

When you introduce external services, async cloud functions, environment variables, feature flags, dependencies, missing mocks... then its not the same, and the whole containerization loses its shine and starts to cost more than its worth.

Ideal world would be... ideal, but its not. And docker is not necessary for every dev, by any stretch of an imagination.

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Paweł Kowalski

Also, if docker is necessary for quality software - are you saying that before docker was invented, there was no quality software?

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Oleksandr Simonov

It was much harder to achieve same level of quality.

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Roelof Jan Elsinga

Can you fix the indentation of the yaml files? I'd love to follow the workflow!

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Oleksandr Simonov

Sure! We will do this shortly

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Roelof Jan Elsinga

It looks great now, thanks! :)

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Mugoya Dihfahsih

you have made me pick interest in using docker, though am a python and django guy, i guess integrating this wont be a hustle for me