This is the second in a series of blog posts describing our evolution of Shopify toward a Docker-powered, containerized data center. This instalment will focus on the creation of the container used in our production environment when you visit a Shopify storefront.

Read the first post in this series here.

Why containerize?

Before we dive into the mechanics of building containers, let's discuss motivation. Containers have the potential to do for the datacenter what consoles did for gaming. In the early days of PC gaming, each game typically required video or sound driver massaging before you got to play. Gaming consoles however, offered a different experience:

predictability: cartridges were self-contained fun: always ready-to-run, with no downloads or updates.
fast: cartridges used read-only memory for lightning fast speeds.
easy: cartridges were robust and largely child-proof - they were quite literally plug-and-play.

Predictable, fast, and easy are all good things at scale. Docker containers provide the building blocks to make our data centers easier to run and more adaptable by placing applications into self-contained, ready-to-run units much like cartridges did for console games.

Graeme Johnson