Honestly? Pretty fucking awesome if you get it configured correctly. I don't think it's super useful for production (I prefer chef/vagrant) but for dev boxes it's incredible at producing consistent environments even on different OSes and architectures.

Anything that makes it less painful for a dev to destroy and rebuild an environment that's corrupt or even just a bit spooky pays for itself almost immediately.

[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 7 points 9 months ago

I don't think it's super useful for production (I prefer chef/vagrant)

Yeah!

Docker and OCI get abused a lot to thoughtlessly ship a copy of the developer's laptop into production.

Life is so much simpler after taking the time to build thoughtful correct recipes in an orchestration tool.

Anything that makes it less painful for a dev to destroy and rebuild an environment that's corrupt or even just a bit spooky pays for itself almost immediately.

Exactly. The learning curve is mean, but it's worth it quickly as soon as the first mystery bug dies in a rebuild fire.

[–] platypode@sh.itjust.works 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

In my experience, very, but it's also not magic. Being able to package an application with its environment and ship it to any machine that can run Docker is great but it doesn't solve the fact that modern deployment architecture can become extremely complicated, and Docker adds another component that needs configuration and debugging to an already complicated stack.

[–] marcos@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

It's a way to provide standard configuration for your programs without one configuration interfering with another.

Honestly, almost all alternatives work better. But docker is the one you can run on any system without large changes.

[–] GammaGames@beehaw.org 3 points 9 months ago

I think they’re really useful, there are alternatives that I think have feature parity at this point but the concepts of containerization are the same