Many years ago I have heard that docker is an amazing stuff to manage the build, deployment and service life cycle. But at that time, there were also some bad news on security that prevented me from trying it.

And today I finally found a day to play with it. The result is, Docker is a amazing thing to manage my service. It exactly fix my problem that this years I'm trying to improve and contributing to my business.

Service Isolation

Docker will create individual VM to serve each services. Most of OS resource are isolated so that dev doesn't need to care about the system resource(at least less care about it). Also we can keep clean codebase without system specified logic.

In my company we run services in several hosts shared to different teams. It's not a frequent case but also annoying that different services will try to use same port, will try to user different JDK version on the path, will need to change same environment variable.

Some service change those share resource dynamically and leads to random failures/issues that hard to locate.

In this scenario, Docker may be one of solutions.

Unified Stander to Deploy Services

DevOps requires less manual work on our build, test, release process. All stuffs should be able to automatically proceed. It absolutely is a good idea. When we serve our system in a large scale and cooperate with so much teams, more manual work we need, much risk we introduce. No one want to stick in fire-fight at mid night. And Docker provide a unified stander to manage service's resource and environment. That means, we are easily to write automatic process for build, for test and for deployment.

The company I work on has its own solution to manage resource and do things automatically. We have huge set of scripts and softwares to setup dev environment, setup build agents for TeamCity and Jenkins, to deploy application, to verify or monitor the function we provide.
They are awesome, they have provided huge value to business. But it's customized. New engineers are hard to understand the ecosystem.

I think Docker is good way to reduce the learning cost because of aligned style to manage resource

Scalability

It's the most well-known feature for Docker, no need more words to admire it.