What's great
I use Docker as my primary tool for environment isolation. It’s a solid solution for the "works on my machine" issue caused by different dependency versions across dev environments and production. The deployment process has become much more predictable: you define the Dockerfile once, build the image, and it behaves exactly the same everywhere. It’s an industry standard that simply gets the job of containerization done, saving a lot of hassle with host system configurations
What needs improvement
File system performance when mounting volumes on macOS still leaves much to be desired. Despite all the updates, you can still feel the latency on larger projects
How easy was initial setup on your OS and hardware?
Most of the time is spent not on the installation itself, but on fine-tuning resource limits so that Docker doesn't hog too much of the host system's resources in the background. Overall the barrier to entry is very low
What resource usage do containers add on your laptops?
This is the most noticeable downside when working on macOS. Since Docker runs inside a virtual machine, it reserves a significant amount of RAM right at startup. If you're running a heavy project with a dozen microservices and databases, the system load becomes very apparent. On Linux this isn't an issue - the overhead for containerization itself is practically non-existent
How easy is scaling containers in production environments?
Since a container is isolated by definition and contains everything it needs, running one copy or a hundred is just a matter of orchestrator configuration, whether it's Kubernetes or Docker Swarm. The main advantage here is predictability: if a container passes tests locally, it scales exactly the same way in the cloud