Everything we ship runs as containers, on our hosting or yours. It's the single change that ends "it works on my machine" for good.
This is plumbing, and it's the plumbing that makes everything else predictable.
The same image runs on a laptop, in staging and in production, so bugs stop appearing only in the place you can't debug.
A new developer starts the whole system with one command instead of a two-day setup document.
A release is an image. Going back to the previous one is running the previous image.
The same containers run on any cloud or your own servers, which is what keeps hosting a negotiation.
The usual first modernisation step. It changes how software is shipped without changing the software, which makes it unusually low risk.
One command and a new developer has the whole stack. This removes the sentence “it works on my machine” permanently.
Build once, test that exact image, ship that exact image. What runs in production is the thing that passed the tests, not a rebuild of it.
Every site and service we run is containerised, including the platform this site is built on.
A containerised application runs the same on your server, ours or a cloud provider's, which is most of what makes leaving possible.
Written for someone deciding, not for someone who already knows. Skip it if you do.
A way to package an application with everything it needs to run — the runtime, the libraries, the configuration — into one image that behaves identically wherever it's started. Not a virtual machine: it shares the host's kernel, so it starts in a second and costs almost nothing.
Drift. Software fails in production for reasons that have nothing to do with the code: a different library version, a missing package, a setting nobody documented. A container removes the difference between machines, which removes that whole class of failure.
Because it's what makes your software portable. A containerised application runs on your hosting, ours or any cloud, and moving it's a configuration change. That's the practical form of not being locked in, and it's why we containerise everything.
It's not security isolation on its own; a container that runs as root with the host's socket mounted is effectively the host. And it doesn't make anything faster. It makes things reproducible, which is a different and more valuable property.
The signature of environment drift. Containers remove the variable rather than reduce it.
That time is paid on every hire and every laptop replacement. It should be one command.
If the application only runs on one machine set up by hand, you're locked in by accident rather than by contract.
It pays off as soon as more than one person works on it, or as soon as there's a staging environment. Below that it's optional, though rarely harmful.
Containers isolate processes but aren't a security boundary on their own. We combine them with least-privilege users, private networking and current base images.
Usually not. Docker with a simple orchestrator covers most applications, and Kubernetes is a staffing commitment as much as a technology one.
Usually not. Containers are the useful part; Kubernetes is for orchestrating many of them at scale. Most businesses need the first and not the second, and we'll say which you're.
No. They make it reproducible and portable. Speed comes from fixing what is actually slow, which we would measure rather than guess.
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