DEV Community

Kamal Mustafa
Kamal Mustafa

Posted on

Why I used Docker?

A topic came up in my private telegram group on why we use Docker, so I'll just pasting back some of the answers here.

AC: Why Docker ? (because docker is just an additional layer of complexity, and only helps when you're doing a lot of things repeatedly, at scale. Otherwise, it's just a disk space sink). What do you wanna do with docker?

AS: It can be "Just because" guys... I dockerized my vim so from any pc I use I can have same plugins and everything. Like 60 MB compressed image and 130 uncompressed. But that's because I compiled vim with huge flag and threw in python perl lua and ruby otherwise it's much much smaller. My base vim with big feature flag is only 30MB uncompressed.

AC: The reason why "Why Docker?" is asked is to ensure you can see the benefit in containerizing your use case. Otherwise it's just so much more painful.

https://alysivji.github.io/php-mysql-docker-containers.html is already a good start. (He used Docker 'coz he don't wanna hunt down and install PHP-7.2 just for running/testing wordpress).

K: We're python shop so no proper php env. But sometimes customer come with their php script for help, so docker is the easiest to quickly test the script.

Top comments (3)

Collapse
 
lucasprag profile image
lucasprag

I use docker because I have multiple apps and I need to switch between them with ease, for example to build everything I need for my app for the first time I just need to run docker-compose build, even for apps that have elastic search, redis and more than just code and a database. It’s possible to do that without docker though, but with a lot more work and time. Also I’m learning about Kubernetes which requires a container engine.

Great post. I’m curious about how you have dockerized your vim, have you published that somewhere?

Collapse
 
k4ml profile image
Kamal Mustafa

Hi, thanks for sharing. It's not me actually dockerized vim, but I can ask this to that guy, or try to bring him here ;)

Collapse
 
lucasprag profile image
lucasprag

No worries, I was just curious, but it would be great to see more docker blog posts here =)
Thanks