Deploying your services packaged in lightweight Docker images has many practical benefits. In a container, your service usually comes with all the dependencies it needs to run, it’s isolated from the rest of the system, and deployment is as simple as running a docker run command on the target system.
However, most of the benefits of dockerized services can be negated if your Docker images are several gigabytes in size and/or they take several minutes to boot up. Caching Docker layers can help, but ideally you want to have small and fast containers that can be deployed and booted in a mater of minutes, or even seconds.
The first time we used Docker at Rendered Text to package one of Semaphore services, we made many mistakes that resulted in a huge Docker image that was painful for deployment and maintenance. However, we didn’t give up, and, step by step, we improved our images.
Read more at Semaphore Blog
