Learn When To Use Docker & When Not

Who is Docker for?

On defining Docker, it is a tool which is designed to advantage both developers and system administrators, by making it a part of many DevOps toolchains.

For developers

Docker helps to focus on writing code even without worrying about the system that it will ultimately be running on. Moreover, it permits developers to get a head start by using one of the thousands of programs already designed to run in a Docker container as a part of their application.

For operations staff

Docker potentially reduces the number of systems needed and also offers gives flexibility due to its small footprint and lower overhead.

Why is Docker Useful?

i. Fast, consistent delivery of your applications

By allowing developers to work in standardized environments, Docker streamlines the development lifecycle, with the help of local containers that offer our applications and services as well. Moreover, for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows, containers are great.

ii. Responsive deployment and scaling

Furthermore, the container-based platform of Docker permits for highly portable workloads. Its containers can run on several platforms like, on physical or virtual machines in a data center, on a developer’s local laptop, on cloud providers, or also in a mixture of environments.

In addition, due to the lightweight nature and portability of Docker, it is easy to manage workloads dynamically, scaling up or tearing down applications and services in near real time.

iii. Running more workloads on the same hardware

Docker offers a viable, cost-effective alternative to hypervisor-based virtual machines because of its fast and lightweight nature, therefore we can use much of our compute capacity to achieve our business goals. Also, we can say, for high-density environments as well as for small and medium deployments especially where we need to do more with fewer resources, Docker is perfect a right choice.

Explore the latest features of Docker

When to Use Docker?

Here we are listing some scenarios where we can use Docker:

i. Learning new technologies

Docker offers an isolated and disposable environment to get started with a new tool without spending time on installation and configuration. There are many projects which maintain Docker images with their applications those are already installed and configured.

ii. Basic use cases

If your application is basic or standard enough to work with a default Docker image, Pulling images from Docker Hub is also a good solution. There are some cases like using a reverse proxy, hosting a website using a LAMP stack, or setting up a Minecraft server often have an official or well-supported image present on the DockerHub.

iii. App isolation

keeping the components of each application in separate containers will prevent problems with dependency management if we want to run multiple applications on one server.

iv. Developer teams

Docker provides a convenient way to have local development environments that closely match the production environment, if you have developers working with different setups, even without needing to ssh into a remote box.

Docker Use Cases

Now we are listing some of the Docker Use Cases which offers a consistent environment at low overhead by enabling technology of Docker:

i. Simplifying Configuration

Simplifying configuration is the primary use case of Docker. As VMs offers the ability to run any platform with its own config on top of our infrastructure, Docker also offers this same capability even without the overhead of a virtual machine.

In addition, it helps to run our applications over multiple IaaS/PaaS even without any extra tweaks. From Amazon to Google, every IaaS/PaaS provider supports Docker now.

You must read about Docker Compose

ii. Code Pipeline Management

Docker eases the code development and deployment pipeline and offers a consistent environment for the application from dev through production.

iii. Multi-tenancy

It is possible to use Docker in multi-tenant applications.

Basically, it was easy and inexpensive to create isolated environments using Docker especially for running multiple instances of app tiers for each tenant.

iv. Developer Productivity

Basically, we need to achieve two major goals, in the development environment. First, we need the development environment to be as close as possible to produce. And, secondly, we need the development environment to be as fast as possible for the interactive purpose.

In order to attain the first goal, it is must that every service runs on its own VM to reflect how the production application runs. The low overhead of Docker easily permits a few dozen services to run inside different containers on the development environment that generally has a low memory capacity.

Further, to attain the next goal, we make use of docker’s shared volumes to make the application code available to the container from the host OS. As a result, the developer is allowed to edit the source code from his platform & editor of choice and also is able to see the changes right away as the applications run with the help of same source code by running environment set inside the Docker container.

v. Server Consolidation

One of the Docker abilities, “The application isolation” permits consolidating multiple servers to save on cost even without the memory footprint of multiple OSes as well as the ability to share unused memory across the instances. Well as compared to VMs, Docker offers far denser server consolidation.

vi. Debugging Capabilities

There are many tools offered by Docker which are not necessarily specific to containers, yet, they work well with the concept of containers, like the ability to checkpoint containers and container versions, and also to diff two containers that are very useful in fixing an application.

vii. Rapid Deployment

It is possible to create Docker containers in milliseconds. This is not achieved by booting up an OS but by creating containers and just running the application process. And, since Docker images are immutable in nature they ensure us the peace of mind that things will work exactly the way they have been working or exactly they are supposed to work.

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