[rcv]

> I genuinely don't understand what docker brings to the table. I mean, I get the value prop. But it's really not that hard to set up http on vanilla Ubuntu (or God forbid, OpenBSD) and not really have issues.

Sounds great if you're only running a single web server or whatever. My team builds a fairly complex system that's comprised of ~45 unique services. Those services are managed by different teams with slightly different language/library/etc needs and preferences. Before we containerized everything it was a nightmare keeping everything in sync and making sure different teams didn't step on each others dependencies. Some languages have good tooling to help here (e.g. Python virtual environments) but it's not so great if two services require a different version of Boost.

With Docker, each team is just responsible for making sure their own containers build and run. Use whatever you need to get your job done. Our containers get built in CI, so there is basically a zero percent chance I'll come in in the morning and not be able to run the latest head of develop because someone else's dev machine is slightly different from mine. And if it runs on my machine, I have very good confidence it will run on production.

[sroerick]

OK, this seems like an absolutely valid use case. Big enterprise microservice architecture, I get it. If you have islands of dev teams, and a dedicated CI/CD dev ops team, then this makes more sense.

But this puts you in a league with some pretty advanced deployment tools, like high level K8, Ansible, cloud orchestration work, and nobody thinks those tools are really that appropriate for the majority of devteams.

People are out here using docker for like... make install.

[AlphaSite]

Having a reproducible dev environment is great when everyone’s laptop is different and may be running different OSes, libraries, runtimes, etc.

Also docker has the network effect. If there was a good light weight tool that was better enough people would absolutely use it.

But it doesn’t exist.

In an ideal world it wouldn’t exist, but we don’t live there.

[rglullis]

Imagine you have a team of devs, some using macOS, some using Debian, some using NixOS, some on Windows + WSL. Go ahead and try to make sure that everyone's development environment by simply running "git pull" and "make dev"

[em-bee]

15 years ago i has a customer who ran a dozen different services on one machine, php, python, and others. a single dev team. upgrading was a nightmare. you upgraded one service, it broke another. we hadn't yet heard about docker, and used proxmox. but the principle is the same. this is definitely not just big enterprise.

[SkiFire13]

> so there is basically a zero percent chance I'll come in in the morning and not be able to run the latest head of develop because someone else's dev machine is slightly different from mine.

It seems you never had to deal with timezone-dependent tests.

[sroerick]

What are timezone-dependent tests? Sounds like a bummer

[latentsea]

I like how you didn't even ask for any context that would help you evaluate whether or not their chosen architecture is actually suitable for their environment before just blurting out advice that may or may not be applicable (though you would have no idea, not having enquired).

[Bnjoroge]

what they described is a fairly common set up in damn near most enterprises