1 Great Thing in 2014: Docker

What a year! 2014 was my entry year in OSTraining and I couldn’t be more pleased. To meet all the team and work with them daily has been really fun and instructive.

The year was full of interesting projects, and relaunching Alledia was undoubtedly the most entertaining one, at least for me.

Rebuilding Alledia allowed me to play with a wider range of technologies, which I really enjoy, such as Node.js, NoSQL databases and virtual machines.

Virtual machines are one of the most important tools I have as a developer. I have used virtual machines for years. But, two tools I met in 2014 were total game changers: Vagrant and Docker.

Vagrant is great. Basically, it allows you to build Linux VMs like you were cooking, using a ruby file (Vagrantfile) that acts like a recipe. This makes it easier to share, version and reproduce your VMs. Built for distributed systems, Docker can do the same, but in a better way!

I’m saying better, I don’t mean that Vagrant is bad, but considering my needs, Docker can do everything with a lower overhead and greater speed. I use Docker for running multiple environments (Linux Containers) at the same time, starting and stopping them very quickly, trying new setups and trying new software without installing a lot of stuff in my system.

By the way, I still need Vagrant to run the main Linux VM in my Macbook, so they are working side-by-side.

Docker is certainly on top of my toolbox, and it is the base of my development environment now. I can just port my full environment to a new machine or OS installation effortlessly. I have great plans for 2015, a parallel automatic test system for our extensions seems a lot of fun!