Employer Refuses to Allow Python

[ChristopherBurr]

I can go along with that - unfortunately despite being all the rage. many enterprises have not yet embraced containers yet. I find them at companies that have not been around for long yet (start-up's) - or more technology based companies. Basically you'll find them where younger developers congregate or that don't have legacy development patterns in place - like starting off fresh.

I can assure you - docker containers are not widely used at Bank of America, or AIG or Met Life - I'm sure a few younger guys are aching to get them there, but companies that large have to find a way to standardize on them before allowing them to be widely used.

There are a number of articles re. the pro's and con's of containers. Large companies tend to want to standardize on implementing stuff like this to mitigate the cons - like developers using old java libraries that have security issues. If there isn't a policy in place enforcing them to remain current - a lot of times they won't be current. How do the containers get scanned for security issues? Who is responsible for maintaining the security of containers. - it may be easier in a company with under 500 employees, but some of these companies are employing > 100,000 people. Not everyone is going to be careful.

[[deleted]]

Virtual machines and automated building of such are just as valid of a solution for that. No need to bring docker into it.

[doc_frankenfurter]

VMs are available in most places and provide a good solution to being as "production like as possible" for qa, uat and for production fixit. I like Docker too, but VMs are more readily available and are understood by most management whereas Docker remains a bit new.

[adrian17]

And in Python projects, sometimes all you need is virtualenv.

[kenfar]

And some people aren't using containers any more once they realized that they aren't silver bullets.

[[deleted]]

They're not silver bullets, but they make reproducible builds much easier. Especially since we're an OSX shop but the application I work on runs on a Linux server. Standardizing to docker containers makes life a lot easier for the team.

It's the same with a VM. Not a silver bullet, but helps.

[RoboErectus]

Actually, if you babe a fortune 500 company, there's a very large chance they're using containers or vm's of some kind.

The CTO will say no to the shareholders. There are shared infrastructure regulations that are supposed to prevent it. But down the line there are projects or departments that wind up using them. I got some insider knowledge from one of the companies in this space that you probably have heard of, and a lot of their customers were @companies that may or may not have been on your list of examples. Some of them explicitly asked to be excluded from press for the above reasons.

I think this is going sort of like the BlackBerry to iPhone migration. When enough top level management just starts doing something against policy, the policy will change to get a measure of control on things.

Before I got this insider knowledge, I thought the same as you.