A little bit off-topic, but I hope it's relevant enough: can someone who's well-versed in Docker give me some pointers as to how I can use it in a better way? Let me elaborate.
I'm a bit of an old fart when it comes to software development. I prefer stable, slowly evolving solutions. I am a fan of the role of classical distributions. I abhor bundling every piece of software with all its particular versioned dependencies until everything works. I'm not gonna change. And that means I'm probably not the type to use Docker to deploy anything. That being said, I do see great value in it as a way for sysadmins to let semi-trusted people run their own OS on shared hardware without stepping on each other's feet. I love that it lets all of us run each our OS of choice on our compute machines at work. But that's just it: when I use Docker, I pretend it's a VM. I really would like to learn to use it in a better and more appropriate way, but whenever I try to seek out information, quality search results are absolutely covered in garbage 10-second-attention span "just type this until it works" blogposts.
Any pointers?
(Alternative question: are there some cleaner solutions than Docker out there for the workflow I describe above?)
You are confusing two different things.
One is using Docker as a deployment packaging method. The other is using Docker only for development and still deploying traditionally. Sure you can do both, but it doesn't have to be this way.
>when I use Docker, I pretend it's a VM
Also check anti-patterns 1 and 4 here
Anti-pattern 1 perfectly describes how I am (hamfistedly) using Docker. Thanks! However, it doesn't really explain how to fix my mindset. It just says that I should ;-)
Could you give me some hints?
"There is no easy fix for this anti-pattern other than reading about the nature of containers, their building blocks, and their history (going all the way back to the venerable chroot)."
Basically learn the basics (cgroups, namespaces)
You should also study this https://github.com/p8952/bocker
I think I have a basic grasp of those things, but still don't get how Docker uses them.
> You should also study this https://github.com/p8952/bocker
Cool! That's very usefl!