My Origin Story with Docker and Why I'm Using It 10 Years Later
Building and deploying web apps was what led me to Docker and then happily use it for the next 10+ years.
Quick Jump:
Prefer video? Here it is on YouTube.
Docker recently had their 11 year anniversary on March 21st 2024 and my 10 year anniversary of using Docker is coming up in late 2024. I started really using Docker with version 1.4.0 back in December 2014.
Now seemed like a good time to reflect on why I started using Docker and why I continue using it today with no intent of stopping.
The video below covers everything about specific problems I had in development and production around managing multiple environments, running multiple processes per project, dependency version guarantees, onboarding new developers to a project and more.
# Origin Story
Timestamps
- 0:35 – Docker can be applied to most tech stacks
- 1:05 – Rewinding to 2014 to learn Rails
- 2:15 – Installing Ruby with a version manager
- 3:48 – Getting Rails installed
- 5:07 – What about your app’s service dependencies?
- 5:59 – Going from 1 process to more than 1 process
- 6:55 – What about your database?
- 7:47 – What about caching or background worker back-ends?
- 8:33 – Finally, it works on your machine
- 10:34 – Version locking your dependencies
- 11:43 – Onboarding other developers
- 13:12 – Docker caught my radar in 2014
- 15:37 – TL;DR about Ansible
- 16:54 – Spinning up VMs vs Docker to test Ansible
- 18:29 – Problems you may encounter when deploying
- 20:20 – Advantages of using Docker for deployment
What’s your Docker origin story and why do you use it today? Let us know below.