> I'm still stuck at the 'I don't get it' phase, despite looking at Docker, and more recently Kubernetes, several times over the years, mainly because everyone

> I'm still stuck at the 'I don't get it' phase, despite looking at Docker, and more recently Kubernetes, several times over the years, mainly because everyone around me evangelizes it so much. This is me until a few weeks ago. After all the hype, I think some bulb turned on in my head and I'm finally starting to understand the point of all these container shenanigans. > For instance, if I look at a WordPress[1], I'm lost. [...] what if I wanted nginx? What if I don't want it to run on Alpine, but Ubuntu 17? It might help not to think like a sysadmin for a second. You'd pull the wordpress container because you want to run Wordpress. Who cares what's underneath? It should feel to you as a blackbox that might as well be running on hamsters for all you care. And that's great for 99% of the cases, because wordpress is just a puzzle piece in a bigger picture and we developers shouldn't have to spend too much time thinking "ah, what were the required rewrite rules for wordpress again?" when there's more important stuff you should be spending your energy on. If you really need to tweak the internals of the blackbox, yeah, write your own Dockerfile, but you'll find there's often no need. I've been a sysadmin for years, and then a lone wolf developer, and never understood the point of Docker to manage my projects, now I find myself at the engineering helm of a company and need to juggle all the legacy pieces of software we have, and all the new stuff in the pipeline: MySQL, PHP 5 applications, PHP 7 sites, Elixir app, Node for SSR, Redis, Prometheus, Grafana, etc. I jumped into the Ansible bandwagon immediately because configuring servers by hand is an irresponsible idea, but now I have to manage all these small blocks that have completely different runtime needs, and let me tell you, my goal for the first half of 2018 is to containerise everything and retain my sanity. I don't know Kubernetes very much, seems to be the next hyped thing but still feels very complicated unless you're in the loving embrace of Google Cloud/AWS. I still believe in bare, cheap VPSes and in-house infrastructure. I'm still investigating Docker Swarm to orchestrate multiple containers across servers but it's hard to tell the real world performance for the hype. Hope this helps!