You've got a new Drupal project. But before you can even start working on the website, you need to set up your development environment. Pull the code, grab the database, configure a local web server, yada yada yada...
At Drupal Open Days Dublin back in 2013, I presented our solution to avoid this unproductive busy work: a VM containing a miniature version of our freistilbox hosting environment. With its rather big VM image, a long provisioning process and low content delivery performance, it was far from perfect.
Two years later, there's Docker. This tool for creating und running Linux containers has been around for a while now and has become a favourite of both developers and venture capitalists alike. Docker makes it easy for you to manage Linux containers, which are compute units that are much more lightweight than full virtual machines. You can spin up a Linux container from a pre-built image within seconds. Preparing such an image is easy, and thanks to a cleverly layered file system, images can even be built on top of each other.
In my talk, I'll highlight the most important features of Docker and demonstrate how you can use it to create an amazingly efficient environment for Drupal development.
Update: Here are the slides of my talk