
Ask HN: What's your container story? - shrineOfLies
I&#x27;m doing my research project on containers, their usefulness and pain points. I greatly appreciate anyone who wishes to share their container story with me :)
1. Do you use or wish to you containers in your company? If so, How many containers do you run in production?<p>2. What kinds of jobs are running on your container deployment (analytics?, batch processing, CI&#x2F;CD)?<p>3. How big is your company(employees, revenue, users)? and what field is it in (mobile, AI)?<p>4. Do you use any orchestrators&#x2F;special tools (kubernetes&#x2F;docker swarm)?<p>5. What is the biggest challenge in using containers for you?
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trcollinson
I actually really love containers so I will bite on this:

1) We use containers all over our process. From local development to
production. In production we run in AWS ECS Service clusters with 9 containers
per cluster. These are mostly rails servers and nginx reverse proxy's.

2) We run rails servers, nginx reverse proxy's, CI/CD uses containers, we have
jobs for data processing that use containers. Probably other things too.

3) Things :D

4) Yes and no. We don't use orchestration tools but we do have orchestration
using customer rake tests and deep integration with our CI/CD environment.

5) It's hard to hug a container... that's the biggest challenge.

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diogok
Happy container user here. At previous company:

1\. Using containers, close to 20 of them in production. Same for homolog, and
a few at a time for dev;

2\. Everything: Database (CouchDB+ES), Apps(in PHP, Ruby and Clojure) and
auxiliary stuff(proxy, wiki, static server, mailer...);

3\. Small: 2 techs, 1k users. Biodiversity conservation in the government;

4\. No orchestrators. Using docker-compose only;

5\. On boarding new members that are not experienced, sometimes takes a while
for the abstraction to "kick in";

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barrystaes
No details but some insights; 1) We now use 0 containers in production, only
in dev/test env. 2) One docker per background service, for now. 4) docker CLI
for now, later some GitLab CI tests 5) My Windows workstation.

Thing i want to add on usefulness: To me containers are mostly a way to
abstract configuration and document it in code. Lots of server processes go
into a cloud, and this can help us iterate faster in the future.

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gtirloni
If you search for "state containers 2016", you'll get more data.

