But it also sounds like you are operating within a larger organization. So your requirements may be different from mine.
This insistent push that the old way was good and why did we expend all this effort to make a new thing that I don't want to bother learning the five new invocations to just doesn't line up with the needs of today.
Docker pull, docker exec, docker ps, docker logs and you've pretty much got what you need for ninety percent of your job.
This stuff is not hard. You make it hard for yourself by digging in.
"New is good" is also no general justification. It always depends on the context. Several replies in this thread mention very good use cases where Docker makes sense. From what you wrote, it sounds to me like it also makes sense in your environment.
Yes I mean I don't want to have to learn things that don't bring me value. But it's not about learning the commands. It's about having to repeat them over and over again in my daily work. About the associated mental burden "am I in the container now? Is it running?" And about everything taking longer, be it running tests in Docker or pushing to a registry and waiting for the new container to be spawned. As a single dev, and I feel this is where your and my requirements differ, it simply is not worth it.
I would not want to go back to the old ways of doing things.
VSCode lets you debug inside a Docker container.
> or in production, do things such as inspecting log files
Logs should be sent out of the container, either directly (mount a /logs folder, push them to Sentry / ELK / etc.) or by simply logging to stdout and having Docker send the logs where you want.
> monitoring system resources
Docker processes are still processes. They show up in `top` and friends just fine.
> running necessary commands if there is something urgent...?
`Docker exec my_container <insert command here>`.
Although I've never even considered doing that. For the past few years the resolution to a production bug has always been "rollback to the previous image, then if any data got borked fix it in the database".