Programming Inside a Container
I’ve worked with a few developers that have been adamant about developing inside of containers. What I’ve noticed:<p>Terrible performance. One of my engineers recently thought that 150ms was terrific for a HTTP request. Break out of the container and it was <10ms. YMMV.<p>Fragile everything: Because one expects a “pristine” environment, often any slight change causes the entire stack to fall apart. This doesn’t happen at the start, but creeps in over time, until you can’t even update base images. I’ve seen it a lot. It ends up only adding an additional layer of complication.<p>Etc.<p>There are <i>definitely</i> reasons to do this... But when a pedantic developer that needs everything to be “just right” does it, it often becomes a disaster, leading to shortcuts and a lack of adaptability.<p>There’s also the developer that has no idea WTF is going on. They use a standard Rails/PHP/NodeJS/etc container and don’t understand how it works. Sometimes, they don’t even know that their system can run their stack natively. I’ve been on teams that have said “Let’s just use Docker because X doesn’t know how to install Y.”<p>Docker is fantastic for many things, but let’s stop throwing it at everything.