I have no idea if your point of view is sysadmin, devops, developer (front end/backend?), employee, and/or freelancer. I like docker because I am all of those,

I have no idea if your point of view is sysadmin, devops, developer (front end/backend?), employee, and/or freelancer. I like docker because I am all of those, despite never actually using docker on the production/deployment side. I'll go over how docker helps me. I use OSX and Debian/Ubuntu. I currently freelance for a project that uses MongoDB. I use MongoDB for nothing else, nor do I want to use it. In the past, I would infect my system with MongoDB PPAs that would give me some version of MongoDB (who really knows which version) and would break my apt-get update randomly. I like to tinker with severs. I consider tinkering to imply fun, interesting, or accomplishing. Fixing MongoDB PPAs breaking my system is the opposite of fun and interesting. It occupies time I should be working for money or tinkering for fun. To refer to "unfun tinkering" we'll use the term "yak shaving". I fixed this by adding a docker-compose yaml file that specifies the same MongoDB version as used in production. I run docker-compose up when I'm working on the project. I can work on the project faster now and keep my system safe from MongoDB. With my other projects, I have a docker-compose yaml file that specifies which version of postgre and redis I'm using. It's the fastest and easiest way to get the exact versions I want without commingling the projects databases with other projects I'm working on (this is huge for freelancing). It's faster than vagrant (but I think I heard vagrant is getting docker support as a VM backend). Finally, one of the docker files is basically a bash script with extra caveats. You put your build script there. Or you can run your existing bash for from it. There might be some caching advantage to converting it, I'm not sure. Knowing nearly nothing about what you actually do or work with, I'd guess that there is a reasonable chance that the cost of learning docker could be higher than the value you would get out of learning it. It was worth it for me though.