I always though of containers as production-level artifacts. In development, I prefer to run most of my environment directly (if possible). Some components can

I always though of containers as production-level artifacts. In development, I prefer to run most of my environment directly (if possible). Some components can be run as containers if necessary. Containers provide consistency and isolation. I dont think container, as an abstraction, is needed at the development stage. Once development is done, then you pass around a resultant container. For example, I run my Rails projects directly on my Mac (Rails + Native MySQL), my coworker on Linux runs it there natively as well. That means we have to deal with runtime platform issues, true. However when we're ready to "release", we build a container that is then tested, and released to prod.