A variety of companies are already using containers at scale in production. In the previous chapter, we looked at how and why Spotify, DramaFever, Built.io, and the Institute of Investigation, Innovation and Postgraduate Studies in Education (IIIEPE) use containers. Now let’s dive in and take a closer look at each organization’s workflows.
Building the Application and Managing Pull Requests
One of the appeals of using containers in production is the capacity to create a seamless development-to-production environment that may originate on a developers laptop, and can be moved wholesale to testing and deployment without errors introduced due to changes in the infrastructure environment.
What IIIEPE Uses
Luis Elizondo, lead developer at the Institute of Investigation, Innovation and Postgraduate Studies in Education, says that, before Docker, moving apps from development to production was one of their biggest issues. Now developers build base images and publicly release them to Docker Hub. All applications have a standard structure, including application, log and files subdirectories. These are the subdirectories that the developers will mostly use, while a Dockerfile, YAML file for Docker Compose, and Makefile hide complexities about the application container environment that developers dont necessarily need to know.
