As of 2025 containerization has become the industry standard for modern software development and deployment.
The following claims about development containerization will be simple and straightforward.
Personal feedback
- It eliminates “works on my machine” drift by running code in a controlled, reproducible environment.
- I use the same stack as production and my teammates, without polluting my OS.
- I can juggle multiple projects with conflicting versions cleanly.
docker compose up -d is faster than hand-installing and configuring databases, queues, and web servers.- Swapping laptops or OSs doesn’t matter. Pull the image then run it.
The problem of past approach it solves
- Env drift: hidden local tweaks, auto-installed IDE plugins, or open ports that don’t exist in prod.
- Dependency hell on host: clashing toolchains, package upgrades breaking other projects.
- Onboarding friction: missing setup steps, stale docs, tribal knowledge.
- Repro challenges: reproducing test/prod bugs on a messy host is unreliable.
- Corporate restrictions: limited ability to install build tools on desktops.
- Clean exits:
containers stop. No lingering daemons hogging ports/CPU.
- CI parity: the same image runs locally and in pipelines for consistent results.
- Team standardization: share a compose file and everyone runs the same stack.
The thing it simplifies we did not think about
- Living documentation: the Dockerfile is an executable spec of the environment.
- Time travel: pinning images/locks makes rolling back toolchain changes trivial.
- Parallel stacks: spin up multiple versions of services without fighting the host.
- Security posture: less need for host-level installs and escalated privileges.
Drawbacks
- Overhead: images can be large; builds and pulls take time and disk space.
tale