Mega2580.Solutions
September 2019

Containers didn't fix our deploy problems, process did

By M. Kowalski · 5 min read

A team we worked with this year had containerized their entire stack the year before, expecting it to solve their deployment reliability problems. It hadn't. Deploys still required a specific engineer, still had no rollback path, still happened over SSH into a box that happened to be running Docker.

Containers are a packaging format. They make certain problems easier to solve — consistent environments, easier rollbacks if you build for it — but they don't solve anything by existing. The actual fix was the same thing it always is: a pipeline that runs the same steps every time, without a human deciding what those steps are on the fly.

We rebuilt their release process around the containers they already had, not around new tooling. Two weeks of work, and the specific-engineer bottleneck was gone. The container migration from the year before turned out to matter a lot less than everyone had assumed it would.