I'm in a similar boat. I'm trying hard to convince myself that containers aren't just a particularly complex version of applications that bundle their own depen

I'm in a similar boat. I'm trying hard to convince myself that containers aren't just a particularly complex version of applications that bundle their own dependencies. Which is actually a fairly necessary thing, because, as is, many popular tech stacks simply don't have a built-in way to do this, and, even when they do, it's often not all that self-contained, and they all work differently. As a concrete example, I spent all of yesterday trying to get up and running with some sort of Spark/Scala notebook system running on my host machine, and it was an exercise in pure annoyance and frustration. This morning I gave up, rolled back that whole mess of packages and homebuilt binaries and environment variables and whatnot, and (re)installed Docker so I could give Zeppelin's Docker image a try. I've been working happily ever since. So, I'm grudgingly accepting it. I also wish we had something less hacky. But tech in general is so duct taped together at this point that I'm not even sure that's a possibility. It's the solution we need, not the one we deserve.