Speed. I’m working on a new personal project. The last project I was on, I took time to write Terraform to deploy to AWS Elastic Beanstalk where I ran Docker containers. It took me two days to get all of that setup, and I consider that time to have been poorly utilized.

Yes, I can use Docker and deploy to my own server, but I really want to focus on the product/service being built, not infrastructure. I’m using Heroku now because it is free (for the moment), and setup is relatively quick. I just added Redis and Celery last night. That was mostly a matter of clicking to add the add-on, and updating some Django settings.

If the project takes off, and makes some money, maybe I’ll move to a different provider. At this stage, however, the costs outweigh the benefits.

> The last project I was on, I took time to write Terraform to deploy to AWS Elastic Beanstalk where I ran Docker containers. It took me two days to get all of that setup, and I consider that time to have been poorly utilized.

To be fair, you don't need that whole stack to run containers, and most of the work you had to do was to operate a particular choice of infrastructure services and tooling that are not necessary to run containers.

All you need to run containers in a single-node setup is Docker, and that's it.

That's true. I wanted to maintain good continuous delivery practices while minimizing the need to worry about individual resources (e.g. web server, database server, DNS), which is why I opted for Elastic Beanstalk. Then I fell down the Terraform rabbit hole.

Docker definitely gets the job done, but I would still have to worry about dealing with data backups, DNS, and deploying to the server. Heroku worries about all of that for me now.

Not having to deal with Docker.

In your opinion what's the problem with Docker?

My biggest nitpick is being unable to mount an external volume during a build (without doing hacky stuff).

Can't you just share a volume to the image? That's not hacky (in my opinion).

There was some quirky edge case that made that not possible. I don't remember what it was, as this was a couple years ago.