What is important in Docker is the Dockerfile

Docker is a way to create a world for your application (or a part of it) and isolating it from the outer world (for the oldest geeks, do you remember Populous? Well, that’s what you’re doing by using Docker, you are the God and you rules everything from ground design to interactions)

We do that by telling Docker how to construct the world, creating the lands, populating it with living creatures, all of this is described in the dockerfile : to continue with the god metaphor, this is the Genesis Book. You will describe everything that makes your application’s ecosystem functional; from the operating system you choose to the starting of your application through all configuration parts. This is good because by writing this description of the world creation, we create a reproducible and stable world. And a stable world is the first step for a stable application. If environment surrounding your application changes in every new installation (and doing it manually, it will) it will lead you to instability.

This is why it is important to stabilize environment. And this is the first step of the industrialisation process of your application, and with this you reduce instability, greatly accelerates deployment, and finally that will raise the productivity of you, your teammates and your application will looks shinier. Yes nut no :-). Of course, you can’t reuse dockerfile as-it outside the docker world, but you can reuse the content (or more generally, the concepts).

When you’re thinking of how you will construct your world, you think about the dependencies, their relationships, the way to configure it effectively, in short, you think about the industrialisation of your application, how to install/configure/manage it.

Once you achieved to use docker for your application, you made the most difficult (in general, you made modifications to the dockerfile AND to your application), it is now easy to extrapolate/generify the process to make your application deployable (almost) everywhere. If you compare a dockerfile and the postinst file of a debian package (or any other package manager file), you’ll see they have a lot in common, it’s most a subject of translating one description to another, no magic needed.

Using Docker during development is now a commonly accepted idea, and this is a good habit but when it won’t be changing anymore, you could think of transforming it into a native package (debian, RPM, once you made it for one, it’s only some adaptations for another, they’re all similar). By doing this, you will gain those benefits:

And finally, you will be able to fly yourself !

Ecosystem independence

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