Chris Collins

It's difficult, even in retrospect, to know which came first for us: containers or a shift towards DevOps culture. At Duke University's Office of Information Technology (OIT), we began looking at containers as a way to achieve higher density from the virtualized infrastructure used to host websites. Virtual machine (VM) sprawl had started to become a problem. We favored separating each client's website onto its own VM for both segregation and organization, but steady growth meant we were managing more servers than we could handle. As we looked for ways to lower management overhead and make better use of resources, Docker hit the news, and we began to experiment with containerization for our web applications...