I'm a huge fan of docker, but I've also drawn a comparison to linking in the past: some people are using it to defer (not solve!) Dependency management and distro ecosystem complexities. Fossilizing dependencies is not the future; that's just like static linking. And just as in static linking, if you hide in the corner, avoiding your distro's dependency and patch and package management systems, this ultimately creates more avoidable pain.
So I've recently reimplemented some of our applications service dependencies in docker for the main reasons of mitigating dependency issues and allowing for for developer local consistency.
I fully admit this is deferring solving these issues fully (solr 1.4.1 really?) but it has allowed for minimizing the issues the existing backlog was causing us. Arguably its also brought more consistency to our environments vs the chef/puppet/hand rolled management tools. We could have used these tools with a different process to achieve similar results though.
Yeah, I totally get it - I realized I'm a hypocrite when I posted this; just a few weeks ago I put a custom build environment together with an obscure version of gcc because I'm dealing with some code that depends on some of those "bugs".
I just don't think it's healthy to embrace this as an alternative to proper maintenance.
