I guess we both understand things well enough to know that limits to draw are not rigid. That being said, here is my take on what you say. An app should logica

I guess we both understand things well enough to know that limits to draw are not rigid. That being said, here is my take on what you say. An app should logically behave as a single unit. I would say that's true, and that unit is a cluster of containers. Docker is not yet ready as a tool to manage clusters of containers, but I believe it will. In the meantime tools like Fig or Gaudi are exploring the design space. You say that having everything separate is back to square one, because you have to manage things separately. My opinion is to develop tools to manage cluster of containers, not to cram things to fit in a single one (I'm not being harsh, sorry if it sounds like). If you use Docker to group things (at the container level, instead of at the cluster of containers level), what should we do if I want to share something with you (a program) ? I can be nice and provide a Dockerfile, but you would still have to put it in your existing "logical single unit", thus loosing the benefits of, e.g. dependencies isolation. The distribution case for enduser is a good one, where the limits will depend on what you really want. For instance if you don't expect people to expand your app by adding additional processes, why not. But I think it is still a workaround for the cluster-level tool I keep talking about. I am using Docker to create a cluster of containers (for https://reesd.com https://reesd.com). Since the infamous cluster-level tool of my dream doesn't exist yet, I'm still relying on Bash scripts (because I feel like exploring my possibilities and don't want to start writing a solidified tool). The script is pretty simple: a bunch of `docker run -d`, saving containers IDs and IPs around (this could be replaced by `docker inspect` and such). Well that script is done so it can be run next to itself multiple times. So I can have multiple instances of the whole Reesd service on my laptop. To deploy it, I run the same script, possibly next to the live one. I have additional scripts to e.g. replace one specific container (say, the web app). So really when talking about uniformity, I want to be able to run Reesd on my laptop, or on multiple machines, and possibly side-by-side, using the same Docker features. A possibility that I haven't tried regarding your last paragraph is the docker-in-docker feature.