Advantages and Disadvantages of Docker – Learn Docker

Instead of several Docker Features, Docker also offers many advantages as well as limitations. So, after learning the features and overview of Docker in our previous articles, it’s time to list out all the advantages and disadvantages of Docker.

Hence, in this article, “Docker Advantages and Limitations”we will learn all Docker Pros and Cons one by one in detail.

So, let’s start the Advantages and Disadvantages of Docker.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Docker

Below, we are discussing the major limitations and benefits of Docker, let’s look one by one –

i. Benefits of Docker

Following are some advantages of Docker, let’s discuss them in detail

a. Return on Investment and Cost Savings

Dockers first advantage is ROI. Especially for large, established companies, which need to generate steady revenue over the long term, the solution is only better if it can drive down costs while raising profits.

b. Rapid Deployment

It can decrease deployment to seconds. It is because of the fact that it can create a container for every process and even does not boot an OS. So, even without worrying about the cost to bring it up again, it would be higher than what is affordable, Data can be created as well as destroyed.

c. Security

Docker makes sure that applications that are running on containers are completely segregated and isolated from each other, from a security point of view, by granting us complete control over traffic flow and management.

d. Simplicity and Faster Configurations

The way Docker simplifies the matters is one of the key benefits of it. It gives flexibility to users to take their own configuration, put that into the code, and further deploy it without any problems.

However, the requirements of the infrastructure are no longer linked with the environment of the application, as Docker can be used in a wide variety of environments.

e. CI Efficiency

With the help of a Docker, we can build a container image and can further use that same image over every step of the deployment process.

The advantage of it is the ability to separate non-dependent steps and also run them in parallel. In addition, the duration of time it takes from build to production may speed up notably.

f. Continuous Integration

While it comes to Continuous Integration, Docker works well as part of its pipelines along with tools such as Travis, Jenkins, and Wercker.

These tools can save the new version as a Docker image, every time our source code is updated, just tag it with a version number and push to Docker Hub, then deploy it to production.

ii. Limitations of Docker

Some disadvantages of Docker are discussed, here:

a. Missing features

There are a ton of feature requests are under progress, like container self-registration, and self-inspects, copying files from the host to the container, and many more.

b. Data in the container

There are times when a container goes down, so after that, it needs a backup and recovery strategy, although we have several solutions for that they are not automated or not very scalable yet.

c. Run applications as fast as a bare-metal serve

In comparison with the virtual machines, Docker containers have less overhead but not zero overhead. If we run, an application directly on a bare-metal server we get true bare-metal speed even without using containers or virtual machines. However, Containers don’t run at bare-metal speeds.

d. Provide cross-platform compatibility

The one major issue is if an application designed to run in a Docker container on Windows, then it can’t run on Linux or vice versa. However, Virtual machines are not subject to this limitation.

So, this limitation makes Docker less attractive in some highly heterogeneous environments which are composed of both Windows and Linux servers.

e. Run applications with graphical interfaces

In general, Docker is designed for hosting applications which run on the command line. Though we have a few ways (like X11 forwarding) by which we can make it possible to run a graphical interface inside a Docker container, however, this is clunky.

Hence we can say, for applications that require rich interfaces, Docker is not a good solution.

f. Solve all your security problems

In simple words,  we need to evaluate the Docker-specific security risks and make sure we can handle them before moving workloads to Docker.

The reason behind it is that Docker creates new security challenges like the difficulty of monitoring multiple moving pieces within a large-scale, dynamic Docker environment.

So, this was all in Advantages and Disadvantages of Docker. Hope you like our explanation.

Conclusion

Hence, we have seen both Docker advantages and limitations in detail. So, learning them will definitely help us before using it. Though there are many more Docker articles are in a queue. Stay tuned to DataFlair, Keep learning!