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How to actually make your life easier with Docker

Joe Sweeney on October 31, 2019

When Docker came out in 2013, the benefits being touted were pretty clear. "Full isolation from host machine and other apps", "perfectly-reproducib...
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Kevin Woblick

Docker, or containerization, is one of these things that no one really cared about ten years ago. But now... damn I couldn't survive one dev day without it. All the hassles of working with different projects, simply gone. Let alone setting up different PHP versions correctly, which is a huge pain without having Docker containers.

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Thorsten Hirsch

Nobody cared about containerisation ten years ago, because it didn't exist ten years ago. :-)

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ossm1db

LXC was released in 2008.

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Thorsten Hirsch

Yes, but in 2008 you couldn't do anything with it, only kernel developers were hacking with it. It was in 2014 when LXC 1.0 was finished and cgroups coming to the kernel that paved the way for Docker.

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Kevin Woblick

"10 years" was not meant to specify the exact date when Docker was released, but in a more broader manner for container-solutions.

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Thorsten Hirsch

There were no mentionable container-solutions before Docker. All we had was VMs. Well, there were jails in FreeBSD and zones in Solaris, and I guess z/OS also had a very enterprisey solution, but none of them were useful for developers.

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Zafri Zulkipli

One of my favorite thing about docker is, there is so many images available. Let say I wanna spin up jenkins for a quick CI/CD, image is already there. Gitlab, it's there, and without much configuration as well!

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Peter Witham

I have to agree, I am finding more and more that Docker is offering solutions to problems quicker than me setting everything up manually.

The next problem is to stop spending so long trying out so many interesting images :)

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Mike CK • Edited

I realised the power of Docker when I started using Hasura. Whenever I needed to add any functionality to the server, all I needed was to add the relevant configuration details to the docker-compose.yml.

Docker allowed me to use a single DigitalOcean droplet to run Hasura and a Node.js authentication app side by side.

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Andy Zhu

Thanks for sharing!

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Joe Sweeney

Yeah, full isolation might be a stretch, especially with outbound connections. Thanks for the input.