Why bother?

At this point, I can see you scratching your head and asking yourself: Why bother? Why should you take on all this seemingly huge effort just to containerize a legacy application? What are the benefits?

It turns out that the return on investment (ROI) is huge. Enterprise customers of Docker have publicly disclosed at conferences such as DockerCon 2018 and 2019 that they are seeing these two main benefits of Dockerizing traditional applications:

• More than a 50% saving in maintenance costs.
• Up to a 90% reduction in the time between the deployments of new releases.

The costs saved by reducing the maintenance overhead can be directly reinvested and used to develop new features and products. The time saved during new releases of traditional applications makes a business more agile and able to react to changing customer or market needs more quickly.

Now that we have discussed at length how to build Docker images, it is time to learn how we can ship those images through the various stages of the software delivery pipeline.