Input Request: How Do You Use Docker Containers For Your Local Development?

Greetings One and All!

Here are some containers used for development

Today is the day when you get to do your part to help explore the new world of application development using containers!

I have been to a bunch of conferences and talked to a bunch of our customers using containers for applications. Given my focus on application development and developer evangelism/advocacy - my immediate thoughts went to "How are developers incorporating Docker containers into their daily workflows?".

Your Help is Requested

To get at this question, I have created a very short Survey that shouldn't take you more than 5 minutes to complete (I promise!).  After the survey closes, I will be releasing both the analysis and the results (anonymized without IPs) to everyone.

Containers are for Coding too?

Part of the reason why I am curious about this is because when I tried Containers for the first time, other than their portability, I thought they just felt like lightweight and fast VMs. They were interesting, but not in terms of making my job of building applications easier, faster, or more fun. I could see why they mattered when you went to deploy, scale, or "microservice" your application - but not for writing code.

I could also see how Docker Containers in a Platform as a Service or some other orchestration framework would be really nice. OpenShift has been using containers since day 1 but they were our "gears + cartridges". Docker containers give us a nice portable set of specifications for the "gears + cartridges" in one file, along with a large community of container authors.

Emerging Best Practices for Local Development

Which leads to the second reason I am interested in this survey; how should I start using Docker containers in my daily workflow. In talking to developers,  I have noticed that there doesn't seem to be "best practices" or even consistency in the developer community on how to do your local, iterative development with containers. To be clear, there does seem to be more maturity in the phase of the development cycles that deals with CI/CD and testing using Docker containers. But that phase of my development work happens much less frequently during the day compared to iterative small code changes or trying to debug new code.

Spread This Survey, Please!

To this end, I ask for your help in spreading the news of this survey far and wide. I will release the resulting data set and my analysis to the community - the more participants we get the better the sense we can get of the state of Docker containers for development.

The survey is only 16 questions, with 6 of them being "demographic" type questions. There are no large annoying matrix of questions where you have to rate 500 different things on a scale from Strongly Like to Strongly Dislike.

You can do the survey even if your sum total of Docker experience is reading this blog post. So here is the link - let's do this!

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/dockerdev

Also, if there is something we didn't ask that you are burning to tell us about doing your coding with Docker containers, we've also included an open-ended comment box at the end, so you can add in any thing else you'd like to share with us.

Thanks again for taking the time and sharing your insights with the wider developer community!