> We have converted our entire staging environment from a handful of AMIs to a single bare metal host running Docker.
I've seen this start happening more and more. Bare metal over-subscription through containers is pretty damn powerful. Along with the convenience of shipping/moving containers around, it's even cooler.
> If tests fail, we leave a Docker image for our engineers to examine.
This cannot be overstated. Having QA (either automated or manual) be able to preserve a system during issue reproduction and communicating using that is game changing. In this type of work flow, packaging and sending state vs. packaging and sending text which a human must do to reproduce said state.. real efficiency gains.
Thanks for the great article.