At what scale would using a Docker container start to pay off in an AWS environment?
Hi Thomas. I'm glad to be here.
Even a single instance of a Linux container can be very beneficial. The container image format makes it very easy to deploy a Linux application and its dependencies as a single asset that will run exactly as expected on any modern Linux system. Combining this packaging format with a simple deployment API makes any scale much easier to achieve, whether you want to scale up to 100s of containers or down to 3.
Nowadays, it is not unusual to see development teams using containers on their local systems to provide a consistent development environment for everyone on their team. This helps them avoid tool version drift and configuration inconsistencies and can even enable a brand-new team engineer to write code within minutes of onboarding.
I'm unsure if this got to the heart of your question; however, in general, I would say that even a single instance of an application can benefit significantly from being containerized and that one of the additional benefits of taking the time to containerize the application is that it makes it much easier to scale when that time comes.
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https://opencontainers.org/
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https://containers.dev/
I hope this helps.