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Would you say it's one of those things you feel the warm fuzzy feeling with after using it? I've been wanting to give it a try with all the hype surrounding it,

Would you say it's one of those things you feel the warm fuzzy feeling with after using it? I've been wanting to give it a try with all the hype surrounding it, but I don't see what it's going to do that provisioning a $10 Digital Ocean server wouldn't (albeit with a little bit of hassle).

nickstinemates 13y ago
I could literally type for days about the benefits of docker over a $10 digital ocean server, but no one would read it. What I will say is this. If you're writing a trivial application that you and only you will ever need to work with, in an environment completely controlled by you, and you have a recipe that works - you're right, Docker probably isn't for you. If you, like me, work with a huge product suite with many buildtime and runtime dependencies (services and applications), with many different runtime configurations, where even automated installation can take up to 15-20 minutes because of the sheer amount of work that's going on, there's a massive massive amount of efficiency to be gained in the dev/test/release/packaging process, let alone the massive amount of efficiency to be gained by the ops team in working in foreign environments. There are certainly lots of other use cases (PaaS/SaaS are easy,) and those are valuable business building tools, but less interesting to me personally.
- pbsdp 13y ago
  I'd your architecture is that complicated, you might be architecting your systems poorly.
sthatipamala 13y ago
Docker and Digital Ocean servers are different things that can be used together. Docker allows you to distribute applications that come bundled with their own OS-level packages/configuration. Imagine you wanted to run Wordpress on your DO server. Instead of configuring a LAMP stack and setting up Wordpress on it, you could download and run a Wordpress docker container that came bundled with its own LAMP stack. It would be as simple for you as calling "docker run wordpress".Most importantly, its configuration would be completely isolated from that of the host machine.
- ninetax 13y ago
  But that's not quite true is it? You would still have to open up ports on your host, configure security, and somehow do the meta-config for the dockerfile to make sure that if the host goes down, `docker run wordpress` is called on startup right? I really want to get excited about docker, but I guess I just don't understand it. Any links to more specific use cases?

nickstinemates 13y ago

I could literally type for days about the benefits of docker over a $10 digital ocean server, but no one would read it. What I will say is this. If you're writing a trivial application that you and only you will ever need to work with, in an environment completely controlled by you, and you have a recipe that works - you're right, Docker probably isn't for you. If you, like me, work with a huge product suite with many buildtime and runtime dependencies (services and applications), with many different runtime configurations, where even automated installation can take up to 15-20 minutes because of the sheer amount of work that's going on, there's a massive massive amount of efficiency to be gained in the dev/test/release/packaging process, let alone the massive amount of efficiency to be gained by the ops team in working in foreign environments. There are certainly lots of other use cases (PaaS/SaaS are easy,) and those are valuable business building tools, but less interesting to me personally.

pbsdp 13y ago
I'd your architecture is that complicated, you might be architecting your systems poorly.

sthatipamala 13y ago

Docker and Digital Ocean servers are different things that can be used together. Docker allows you to distribute applications that come bundled with their own OS-level packages/configuration. Imagine you wanted to run Wordpress on your DO server. Instead of configuring a LAMP stack and setting up Wordpress on it, you could download and run a Wordpress docker container that came bundled with its own LAMP stack. It would be as simple for you as calling "docker run wordpress".Most importantly, its configuration would be completely isolated from that of the host machine.

ninetax 13y ago
But that's not quite true is it? You would still have to open up ports on your host, configure security, and somehow do the meta-config for the dockerfile to make sure that if the host goes down, `docker run wordpress` is called on startup right? I really want to get excited about docker, but I guess I just don't understand it. Any links to more specific use cases?