Plurrrr

Containers have quickly become the favorite way to deploy software, for a lot of good reasons. They have allowed, for the first time, developers to test "as close to production" as possible. Unlike say, VMs, containers have a minimal performance hit and overhead. Almost all of the new orchestration technology like Kubernetes relies on them and they are an open standard, with a diverse range of corporate rulers overseeing them. In terms of the sky-high view, containers have never been in a better place.

I would argue though that in our haste to adopt this new workflow, we missed some steps. To be clear, this is not to say containers are bad (they aren't) or that they aren't working correctly (they are working mostly as advertised). However many of the benefits to containers aren't being used by organizations correctly, resulting in a worse situation than before. While it is possible to use containers in a stable and easy-to-replicate workflow across a fleet of servers, most businesses don't.

Our industry has made incredible strides in the past decade, thanks in part to technologies like Docker, Docker Compose, and Kubernetes. However, we are still figuring out how to do development in the heterogeneous environments in which we live.