Docker allows you to package an application with all of its dependencies into a standardized unit for software development. Docker containers wrap up a piece of software in a complete filesystem that contains everything it needs to run: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries – anything you can install on a server.

A common issue in software lifecycle management is how to deal with the various environments our application needs to run in (development, test, UAT, production, etc). The differences between these environments in both hardware and software can make deployments a cumbersome and error-prone process. We have gone through setting up and maintaining lots of different environments and experienced all of the possible issues that can arise from having different environments. By using Docker we can eliminate a large number of these issues. Docker guarantees that the application will always run the same, regardless of the environment it is running in.

The obvious benefit for your organisation is reduced deployment costs. The application will always work as designed locally, on another machine, in test or production. Public cloud providers all support Docker containers, so your product can easily be deployed on any of them. This will make your organisation less dependent on a specific hosting environment.

We have already adopted our development processes to use Docker. Our developer environments are based on Docker containers, which greatly reduce the project start-up costs, thus giving us more time to implement more awesome features for you.