Docker and containers - portable, predictable application environments
Containerisation, local development environments, production-ready Docker setups, and Kubernetes for teams that need consistent deployments across every environment.
How we use it
We containerise everything we deploy. Docker Compose for local development and staging, ECS Fargate or Kubernetes for production. Multi-stage builds to keep image sizes minimal. We scan images with Trivy before every deployment.
Best fit for
Docker is used by 57% of professional developers according to the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, making it the most widely adopted infrastructure tool after Git. Docker Desktop's 2024 updates introduced GPU support and model runner for local AI development - meaning containerisation has expanded from backend services to become the standard runtime environment for AI-integrated applications. Teams that build without containers face the "works on my machine" problem with increasing severity as AI tooling dependencies (CUDA drivers, model weights, Python version constraints) add complexity that containers solve cleanly.
What's included
Capabilities
Deployment architecture & IaC (Terraform)
CI/CD pipeline setup & automation
Monitoring, alerting & observability
Backup, rollback & disaster recovery planning
Cost review & right-sizing
Fit analysis
Is this right for you?
Honest breakdown of where Docker & Containers shines — and where it doesn't. Pick the right tool.
When to choose this
Right fit scenarios
Your team has "works on my machine" problems where applications behave differently in development, staging, and production environments - Docker standardises the runtime across all of them
You are onboarding new developers and local environment setup takes more than two hours - a Docker Compose file reduces this to under 15 minutes
Your application has multiple services - web server, database, cache, background worker - that need to be started, stopped, and connected consistently across all environments
You are moving from a manually configured VPS to a cloud deployment and need a portable, reproducible deployment unit that is infrastructure-agnostic
You are scaling toward Kubernetes and need containers as the foundational deployment unit - Docker is the packaging standard that Kubernetes orchestrates
When to choose this
Right fit scenarios
Your team has "works on my machine" problems where applications behave differently in development, staging, and production environments - Docker standardises the runtime across all of them
You are onboarding new developers and local environment setup takes more than two hours - a Docker Compose file reduces this to under 15 minutes
Your application has multiple services - web server, database, cache, background worker - that need to be started, stopped, and connected consistently across all environments
You are moving from a manually configured VPS to a cloud deployment and need a portable, reproducible deployment unit that is infrastructure-agnostic
You are scaling toward Kubernetes and need containers as the foundational deployment unit - Docker is the packaging standard that Kubernetes orchestrates
Honest limitations
Not the best fit if…
Simple single-service applications on managed platforms like Vercel, Render, or Railway where the platform handles environment management without containers
Teams with no Docker experience who need to ship in under four weeks - the learning curve and debugging complexity at short timelines for simple apps is not worth it
Serverless architectures where the execution environment is managed by the platform and containers add unnecessary overhead
Desktop applications with heavy OS-level dependencies that do not containerise cleanly without significant compatibility work
Services