For the longest time I had been happily pulling down images into a local docker-compose environment for working on development projects. It brought joy to be spinning up databases! But I could never quite understand how I'd be able to deploy an application using Docker. Pipelines that built a zip archive and deployed it felt so familiar and understandable - like an FTP upload. Here's my journey to using Docker in production (note to self: you're not technically using it in production get so better hold on a few weeks!)
Outline
- Many use docker in dev but don't know how they can ship production images
- Only ship what you need
- It's okay that your images are different between dev and prod
- Multi-stage builds let you reduce size but not lose out on conciseness and DX
- Tagging your builds
- Tagging the git SHA or Build Number (or both) can be very useful