It’s 2023 and we’re still having this conversation. I’m sitting here, writing this article and listening to the Lex Fridman’s interview with Ginni Rometty.

 

 

Early in the interview, Ginni mentions that the thing that they looked for from candidates wasn’t a college degree (even though they started off that way), instead it was a willingness to change.

I’ve spoken to many senior developers that still don’t believe in Docker or how it might help them. They’re focused on the way that they’ve developed for the past 10 years and are not interested in trying out something that’s slightly foreign.

There are languages and frameworks that encourage docker and make it so simple that there should be no reason to ever look back, like Laravel. And, yet, even now I see developers setting up WAMP and MAMP on their machines and getting Laravel to work that way. Is it fear of the unknown? It very well could be. If you want to see simple Docker utilization for a Python script, you can head over to my Python/Docker article.

https://medium.com/geekculture/getting-started-with-python-and-docker-compose-9847467d7e10

Let’s jump into the benefits of using Docker.

Docker is a popular containerization platform that enables developers to package their applications and dependencies into portable containers. There are several advantages of using Docker for development environments, including:

Consistency

Docker enables developers to create a consistent development environment that can be easily replicated across multiple machines, ensuring that everyone on the team is working with the same setup. This can reduce the likelihood of bugs and errors caused by differences in local environments.

How many times have we seen setup taking longer than an hour? I can count in the hundreds.

Portability

Docker containers are portable, meaning that they can be easily moved between development, staging, and production environments. This makes it easy to test and deploy applications across different platforms and infrastructure.

Don’t like a platform or environment? Just move it from GCP to AWS or vice-versa.

Because Docker containers are portable, developers can deploy their applications quickly and easily to various environments, such as on-premise servers, cloud-based services, or even to other developers for testing.

Isolation

Docker provides a high level of isolation between containers, meaning that different applications and services can run independently without interfering with each other. This can help developers avoid conflicts between dependencies and reduce the likelihood of bugs caused by interactions between different components of an application.

Efficiency

Docker enables developers to spin up new instances of their applications quickly and easily, reducing the time it takes to set up a new development environment. This can help improve developer productivity and accelerate the software development process.

I demoed the Python script above. The steps involved in getting it going is cloning the repo from GitHub and running docker-compose up. In less than 3 minutes, you’re up and running.

Scalability

Docker enables applications to be scaled quickly and easily by adding or removing containers. This can help developers build applications that can handle high levels of traffic and usage without sacrificing performance.Resource efficiency: Docker allows developers to run multiple containers on the same machine, which can lead to more efficient use of resources. This is particularly useful when working on projects that require multiple services or applications to be run simultaneously.

Easy collaboration

With Docker, it’s easy to share development environments with other developers on the team, making collaboration simpler and more streamlined.

You do have to have your Docker Wizard that sets up the initial Dockerfile/docker-compose.yml files.

Version control

Docker enables developers to create and manage version-controlled images of their applications, making it easier to roll back to previous versions if needed.

Security

Docker containers provide an additional layer of security, isolating applications from the host operating system and other containers. This can help prevent potential security vulnerabilities from impacting the host system or other containers.

Summary

It’s 2023. There’s no reason why a developer would ever need to install anything other than Docker on their machine. Need to pull a repo and don’t have git automatically installed on your machine? Grab the alpine/git image. Need a package manager? Grab it from Docker. Need a Python interpreter? Get it from Docker. Need to install additional packages on top of it. Do it in the Dockerfile. Need to maintain 5 different applications all with different versions of a programming language? You can do that too! It really is extremely powerful and allows developers to switch between extremely quickly.