> Dockerfiles are no configuration management system.
Y'know, we might violently agree. That is a much more concise statement than my rambling attempt to explain why I think Docker is so much more palatable for development workflows.
You're right, it is no magic bullet. And I misspoke when I said "configuration management"; I forgot that that's a term of art in operations. By "management" I really just meant "stick it all in one or two files so I can get my checklist down to one step, and manage shared packages in a way that's at least a little bit less kludgey than simply abusing environment variables." So I find that it save some yak shaving, and for that I can deal with it under certain circumstances.
I actually hate using it for deployment or production config management, because IMO it seems to do a crap job at it. And it does a crap job at it precisely because of the features (or lack of features) that make it convenient for development. Even using it to manage our integration tests' runtime dependencies is kind of a hot mess. But I'm willing to concede that, together with Kubernetes, it might be nice for cloud-native elastic scaling microservice-y stuff, insofar as it seems to be popular for that. I don't actually know firsthand; I'm allergic to complexity, so try to avoid building things that way.
Y'know, we might violently agree. That is a much more concise statement than my rambling attempt to explain why I think Docker is so much more palatable for development workflows.
You're right, it is no magic bullet. And I misspoke when I said "configuration management"; I forgot that that's a term of art in operations. By "management" I really just meant "stick it all in one or two files so I can get my checklist down to one step, and manage shared packages in a way that's at least a little bit less kludgey than simply abusing environment variables." So I find that it save some yak shaving, and for that I can deal with it under certain circumstances.
I actually hate using it for deployment or production config management, because IMO it seems to do a crap job at it. And it does a crap job at it precisely because of the features (or lack of features) that make it convenient for development. Even using it to manage our integration tests' runtime dependencies is kind of a hot mess. But I'm willing to concede that, together with Kubernetes, it might be nice for cloud-native elastic scaling microservice-y stuff, insofar as it seems to be popular for that. I don't actually know firsthand; I'm allergic to complexity, so try to avoid building things that way.