there’s a lot of container hype

Illustration of two stick figures with medium-length straight hair. One has hearts in their eyes and a speech bubble that says “containers” with hearts around it, the other one has a thought bubble that says “???”

Here are 2 problems they solve…

problem: building software is annoying

$ ./configure 
$ make all 
ERROR: you have version 
     2.1.1 and you need 
     at least 2.2.4 

solution: package all dependencies in a * container *

stick figure with medium length straight hair and bangs, thinking: I ran the container and the build worked RIGHT AWAY?? is that allowed??

Many CI systems use containers.

containers have their own filesystem

This is the big reason containers are great.

host OS, represented by a box with a smiley face: I’m running Ubuntu 19.04

container, also represented by a box with a smiley face: I’m running an old CentOS distribution host OS from 2014!

problem: deploying software is annoying too

sad stick figure with short curly hair: ugh my website is broken because I used a Python 3.6 feature and the server only has Python 3.5

solution: deploy a container

server: I have the exact same version of everything as in development! no more silly errors!

happy stick person with short curly hair: yay! I can get back to writing code!