When Does It Make Sense to Use Docker?

Using Docker / containers makes sense only if you need to standardize deployment pipelines. Otherwise it’s a waste of time.

When do you need to standardize anything? When you're dealing with a a large quantity.

So, either you:

1. Have many (as in, double digits) microservices comprising one system, or
2. Are in a very large organization with many development teams.

So if you have one or two apps running on Heroku / Beanstalk — leave them there. You’re not missing out on anything. It's pure overhead.

Comments

[Andrew Baisden]

All this talk got me more interested in finding use cases to add Docker to my workflow.

[Mihail Malo]

Easier to do clean updates/uninstalls for smaller services.
That's one of the reasons I use Docker on home automation SBCs.

[Michiel Hendriks]

Instead of wasting time to figure out why your local setup doesn't work you can waste time to figure out why your local docker setup doesn't work.

[ultrageoff]

Created my account just so I could 'like' this :-)

[Ricardo]

Hype :)

[Atomzwieback]

I think it makes also sense to use docker in a small company because if youre building your own build with versions youre able to easy hotswap back your container to an old version if the new build has a problem.

[Gaurav]

We have used Docker container for deployment, there were two reasons for that.

1. We used LibreOffice to convert Docx to pdf via API, so in our application, we need LibreOffice to be installed also, we include the installation of LibreOffice in docker file, we also used puppeteer for generating pdf, for that we need headless chrome browser, that also is installed from docker file.

2. We bought 1 server instance, we needed to deploy multiple apps on 1 server, so multiple apps were having the same env keys such as the SENTRY key for API and WebApp, so we deployed apps on multiple docker containers so API keys, etc do not cause any issues.

[Marko Anastasov]

Thanks for sharing.

This reminds me of my recent use case. We were building our latest book using Pandoc, and to install Pandoc + Latex the right way is such a pain in the ass, using a Docker image was 10x easier! :)

[Shaunak De]

Always.
~ Your team's dev-ops engineer. xxx :P

[Gary]

I use docker for everything because I like the simplicity of spinning up containers. But it does come with it's own problems as others have stated.

[Callum White]

I've recently used them for a much smaller project with only 5 node apps. I found that being able to literally clone the repo, run docker-compose build and docker-compose up was super easy and really helped when I needed to quickly get everything on a laptop and run it at different outdoor testing sites.

[Marko Anastasov]

Why specifically was it easier than using NVM & local npm installs?

[DB]

It does not only make local development in a complex environment a lot simpler like the other comments said, but also exactly documents the requirements for an application to run. Dockerfiles are Infrastructure as Code, and instead of installing stuff around and feeling lucky, all dependencies, packages and steps for getting it up an running are versionable, reviewable and ultimately executable.