That hasn't been my experience with docker at all. Except for pretty simple projects, I can't remember a single project I've worked on where I could just follow

That hasn't been my experience with docker at all. Except for pretty simple projects, I can't remember a single project I've worked on where I could just follow the README/"Here's how to set it up" email/whatever and have it work the first time. Every time a new developer came in, we'd find out that some implicit assumption was baked in somewhere, and finding out where took hours or days because debugging the damn thing is almost impossible. Everyone eventually syncs their environment but that just conveniently provides the illusion of standardization and repeatability. It's the same kind of "standardization" and "repeatability" we used to get twenty years ago -- all standard and repeatable, as long as no one touches the Solaris box that hosts the production deployments and no one updates their workstations. And that's just the "legitimate" stuff. The amount of hours that we've wasted on things like "X runs docker 1.9 but Y runs docker 1.10", or overlay bugs, or image pruning failures, is insane. Breaking things is an inevitable side effect of progress but maybe infrastructure software shouldn't break this much... Far from me to say that 20+ engineers across the world maintaining bash scripts for a dozen services is better. I used to do that and it was extremely terrible. Even when everyone involved had years of experience and the mundane task of updating deployment scripts wasn't delegated to interns, the way it is today (for reasons that I am entirely unable to comprehend). Definitely far more terrible than Docker. Docker is not as terrible, but still pretty terrible. I'm open to the possibility that I've been doing it wrong, and that every team I've worked in/every customer I've worked for has been doing it wrong. But this has been going on for like four years now and enlightenment doesn't seem to be any closer to hitting me...