Docker

Our development and test environment uses Docker extensively. The main goal of Docker is to facilitate developing and testing code in an environment that is as close to production as possible.

Image Management

We manage Docker images differently than most. We don’t use Docker in production (yet). But, we also want our Docker images to match the server environment as closely as possible. If we were to use Dockerfiles to maintain the Docker environment and something not Docker to manage the servers, we would have duplication of effort and divergence between Docker and production and this would undermine the effectiveness of the Docker environment for mimicking production.

Instead of maintaining a Dockerfile for each image, we instead prefer to maintain Dockerfiles for base, bare bones images configured with Ansible. Then, we create and update Docker images by running an Ansible playbook on this base image.