An introduction to Clear Containers

You can build out an application as a perfect set of clean packages, but one of the components wants to use the same port as a component of another application, or requires a different version of some dependency, or whatever.

Containers can let you have *parallel stacks of clean packages*. First write your RPM specfile (or use your package manager of choice) to make a clean, repeatable install of known software. Then wrap a simple Dockerfile (or config for whatever container flavor is hot at deploy time) around that.

Sometimes you see containers used for parallel stacks of "curl | sh" which is a monster time-suck ( http://blog.neutrondrive.com/posts/235158-docker-toxic-he... ) but they don't have to be that way.

Packages for clean, repeatable installs. Wrapped in containers for when you need multiple trees of dependencies on the same box.