I just stumbled across this "Ask HN: What is the actual purpose of Docker?" . After using Docker more and more over the last months, my answers have gradually changed. It used to be more hype-like, with "immutable infrastructure", "portable" and stuff like that. Now it's more practical, I feel I can say more concretely what our benefits are. My favorite answer comes down to Docker being a standardized way of deploying and running applications. The old way of deploying our software was complex with a taste of chaos, then became managed but complicated through the introduction of Puppet (or your configuration management tool of choice). I'm hoping Docker will nudge it more towards the simple (quadrant) . How we used to deploy (and still do) - most of these are done through home-made shell scripts we distribute using Puppet: Installing Debian packages (mostly standard packages, sometimes from 3rd party repositories) Dropping WAR files int...
My thoughts on software development.