Last year at php[tek] 2015 during the hack time I messed around and created a Docker image to run and test PHP7. It was surprisingly easy and I quickly learned that the app I was working on at the time ran fine in PHP7, good deal. So since then I’ve been awaiting the general availability release of PHP7 to move forward with upgrading my apps. The main thing holding me back was I just didn’t want to maintain an image based on compiling from source.

This year I decided to try to participate in the Global Hack day for Docker. Most of the Docker ecosystem of tools are based on the Go language and I’ve never worked with Go before. At work we run a private Docker registry to store some of our Docker images, but unfortunately it does not come with an easy to use interface for browsing the images stored in it or deleting them.

At work we’ve recently started using Amazon’s EC2 Container Service (ECS) for running Docker images in staging and production. In order to simplify our CI/CD process we wrote a script for triggering blue-green deployments. I wrote an article explaining the how and why over on the Codeship Blog, check it out: https://blog.codeship.com/easy-blue-green-deployments-on-amazon-ec2-container-service/

Over the past several months my team at work has been integrating Docker into our software development life-cycle. We’ve run into several road bumps and come up with solutions to work through them in order that we could have a consistent development experience on Docker. The good folks at Codeship published an article I wrote on the topic. If you’re considering using Docker I recommend you check it out to kick-start your process.