Over the last year, we’ve been using Docker in production over at RADIOactive. Docker has been pretty great for us. From an operational perspective, it gives us the advantage of being able to deploy and monitor apps in a generic manner. From a developer’s perspective, application packaging is greatly simplified as well, as any dependencies can just be put into the container no matter what language or framework we are using, with any further configuration being added via environment variables.

I’ve been running a couple of servers on DigitalOcean for some time. I wanted to consolidate the services on each of these servers into one host, but in separate virtual environments, so this seemed like a good opportunity to try out Docker. Docker is a technology allowing us to create processes running within a Container - a sort of lightweight virtual machine that shares system resources with the host such as processes, RAM, and hard disk space.