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> I posit that people who use and love docker have larger teams with proper full-time admins and not just 1-3 people wearing all the hats.

We switched from a Vagrant based workflow, to a docker-compose one, and we are a team of 2 developers. That said, I identified use cases for Docker that offered very compelling advantages. For a typical web app, this may not be the case. In our situation, we run a load that is very background-job intensive, with multiple clusters of external resources used by the background jobs, so it's definitely a different story than the typical 2-3 tier web stack.

If you're working on a Linux workstation, Docker will spin up and run much faster than either VirtualBox or VMWare. This alone makes it worth switching.

I don't know what the current situation is on Windows or MacOSX. Back when I used them for my own work, the only choice was to run a VirtualBox instance running Linux and then run Docker on top of that. Clearly that solution is more of a lateral move from Vagrant.

Unless you need to spin up OpenBSD and FreeBSD instances with an almost like Docker workflow. That’s where I use Vagrant still.

Ok cool. I'd like applications to have a shared persistent storage space which isn't destroyed in between executions and their own network address. Haven't been able to pull it off. If I can't get that then it's a non-starter.

Understood, everyone's use case is different. On my team, we were using Vagrant to spin up something that looked a lot like our test environment (and, in turn, production) and that was a server running MySQL, Apache and PHP. Setting up a Docker instance that ran both and included some test data wasn't hard to setup and was faster to spin up on Linux workstations.

I'm totally open to trying again if I can get to success.

So, what is your stack ? I can help

On Linux you have much better options for vagrant than Virtual Box. I recommend vagrant-lxc

I've also tried Docker 2 different times and couldn't get the demos working on my Macbook Pro. And by now I have a pretty good Vagrantfile that works on both Mac and Windows well.

I'm currently on attempt #5 to grok Docker, and feel like I've finally broken through to understanding.

The problem seems to be that there are no good "overview" tutorials out there that I could find. I'll end up writing one.

> I don't have the time or resources to do all the work that docker requires of me

> I posit that people who use and love docker have larger teams with proper full-time admins and not just 1-3 people wearing all the hats.

I’m not aware of what your use cases are, but I found Docker pretty simple to use and less of a headache than Vagrant. What work is it requiring you to do? I also use it for many projects that I am the sole dev for.

On OSX Vagrant always had issues with rsync of files. If you're using vagrant as just a blank machine, there is no difference between a blank debian/jessie docker image - apart from the lower resource usage. If you're not orchestrating anything concrete onto that vagrant box, I feel a proper workflow would be of benefit, i.e. properly reproducible builds. Take all those manual commands, prefix them with RUN in a docker file, done.

I think you’re describing an issue with virtual box not with Vagrant directly.

You could just as easily and much more portably put those “manual steps” into a shell script and run it as a Vagrant provisioning script. If you pick the right base box you will have portability across Mac, Linux, Windows hosts, using any number of available hypervisor/ish layers (vbox, parallels, VMWare, hyperv, lxc, etc)

Your Vagrantfile is "super" minimal. I like it.

You can execute a Shell script when the box is first provisioned. Just add something like this:

    config.vm.provision :shell, path: "provision.sh"

This might help save doing some manual steps if you have to rebuild the VM for whatever reason.