Absolutely. You will get the most out of it like this. You can run pets, and treat containers VMs but I don't think you will get all the advantages.
* Docker containers can be more secure then traditional environments
Out of the box you get isolation from namespaces (not being able to see the host filesystem or network), resource limits via cgroups, a default seccomp profile that restricts some system calls that could be used in exploits, and more. You can set all these defaults yourself but the majorty of people do not. So there are definit benefits.
* Docker provides for indempotent environments agnostic of hardware concerns etc
Most applications do not talk directly to hardware, the default container does not directly present hardware interfaces, yes.
* Container management software (Kubernetes, etc.) makes Docker much more powerful/useful and is only going to get better
It does help to have software to manage programs across multiple computers, for scaling and redundancy, yes.
Absolutely. You will get the most out of it like this. You can run pets, and treat containers VMs but I don't think you will get all the advantages.
* Docker containers can be more secure then traditional environments
Out of the box you get isolation from namespaces (not being able to see the host filesystem or network), resource limits via cgroups, a default seccomp profile that restricts some system calls that could be used in exploits, and more. You can set all these defaults yourself but the majorty of people do not. So there are definit benefits.
* Docker provides for indempotent environments agnostic of hardware concerns etc
Most applications do not talk directly to hardware, the default container does not directly present hardware interfaces, yes.
* Container management software (Kubernetes, etc.) makes Docker much more powerful/useful and is only going to get better
It does help to have software to manage programs across multiple computers, for scaling and redundancy, yes.