I'm doing my research project on containers, their usefulness and pain points. I greatly appreciate anyone who wishes to share their container story with me :)
1. Do you use or wish to you containers in your company? If so, How many containers do you run in production?<p>2. What kinds of jobs are running on your container deployment (analytics?, batch processing, CI/CD)?<p>3. How big is your company(employees, revenue, users)? and what field is it in (mobile, AI)?<p>4. Do you use any orchestrators/special tools (kubernetes/docker swarm)?<p>5. What is the biggest challenge in using containers for you?
I actually really love containers so I will bite on this:<p>1) We use containers all over our process. From local development to production. In production we run in AWS ECS Service clusters with 9 containers per cluster. These are mostly rails servers and nginx reverse proxy's.<p>2) We run rails servers, nginx reverse proxy's, CI/CD uses containers, we have jobs for data processing that use containers. Probably other things too.<p>3) Things :D<p>4) Yes and no. We don't use orchestration tools but we do have orchestration using customer rake tests and deep integration with our CI/CD environment.<p>5) It's hard to hug a container... that's the biggest challenge.
Happy container user here. At previous company:<p>1. Using containers, close to 20 of them in production. Same for homolog, and a few at a time for dev;<p>2. Everything: Database (CouchDB+ES), Apps(in PHP, Ruby and Clojure) and auxiliary stuff(proxy, wiki, static server, mailer...);<p>3. Small: 2 techs, 1k users. Biodiversity conservation in the government;<p>4. No orchestrators. Using docker-compose only;<p>5. On boarding new members that are not experienced, sometimes takes a while for the abstraction to "kick in";
No details but some insights;
1) We now use 0 containers in production, only in dev/test env.
2) One docker per background service, for now.
4) docker CLI for now, later some GitLab CI tests
5) My Windows workstation.<p>Thing i want to add on usefulness: To me containers are mostly a way to abstract configuration and document it in code. Lots of server processes go into a cloud, and this can help us iterate faster in the future.