Differently people use Docker differently, I see Docker could be useful for several purposes:

1) scalability This is the main advertisement point for Docker I guess. Well it enables your stateless application to scale automatically.

2) being able to deploy without caring about dependencies There are times we want to deploy something into customers' servers. We have no control over their machines' environments. But with Docker, the only thing I need to make sure is that they have it installed.

3) Infrastructure as code All our source code is checked in git and version controlled nicely. When we need to run it again, just clone from git. How nice! But our infrastructure, meaning server formation and service relationship? Not so much. Before using Docker, we basically need to ssh into servers and install dependencies according to the documents. It was not only slow, but unreliable because we all know how documents can lie. With Docker and docker-compose, the infrastructure can be written in code and checked in git. Most importantly, code doesn't lie.

You can surely use other tools to achieve those. I'm not saying Docker is the only way. But I believe it's a good tool to consider when you have those needs.