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Discussion on: As a developer, do you even bother with containerisation?

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Justin Henry

With the tech stack I typically work with, Typescript/Node, I rely on things like PM2 to bring up multiple instances of a project's server with environment variables to dictate which services are going to be used, so I can keep an entire distributed microservice ecosystem in the same project. You get all the portability without needing to separate the codebase. Now as the project gets bigger, it does make more sense to dockerize it and deploy them into space, but until you get that far, containers should not be the first thing you think about.

Containerization should be an after thought, but making sure your code can run in a container is the bare minimum you should do to make sure you aren't coding yourself into a corner.

Early deployments to AWS/Heroku/Vercel/Firebase or whatnot can give you the added benefit of knowing how it will behave in production, but it shouldn't be the driving force behind how you code.

Typically generating the container is specified by DevOps, SysAdmin, etc type people in the organization, so having the engineers worry about it creates unnecessary labor on our side of the workflow. CI/CD should alleviate this so you don't really think about containerization and it makes the workflow even that much simpler.