What is the benefit of dockerize the SPA web app - docker

I dockerize my SPA web app by using nginx as base image then copy my nginx.conf and build files. As Dockerize Vue.js App mention I think many dockerizing SPA solutions are similar.
If I don't use docker I will first build SPA code then copy the build files to nginx root directory (After install/set up nginx I barely change it at all)
So what's the benefit of dockerizing SPA?
----- update -----
One answer said "If the app is dockerized each time you are releasing a new version of your app the Nginx server gets all the new updates available for it." I don't agree with that at all. I don't need the latest version of nginx, after all I only use the basic feature of nginx. Some of my team members just use the nginx version bundled with linux when doing development. If my docker image uses the latest ngixn it actually creates the different environment than the development environment.
I realize my question will be probably closed b/c it will be seen as opinion based. But I have googled it and can't find a satisfied answer.

If I don't use docker I will first build SPA code then copy the build files to nginx root directory (After install/set up nginx I barely change it at all)
This is a security concern... fire and forget is what it seems is being done here regarding the server.
If the app is dockerized each time you are releasing a new version of your app the Nginx server gets all the new updates available for it.
Bear in mind that if your App does not release new versions in a weekly bases then you need to consider to rebuild the docker images at least weekly in order to get the updates and keep everything up to date with the last security patches.
So what's the benefit of dockerizing SPA?
Same environment across development, staging and production. This is called 100% parity across all stages were you run your app, and this true for no matter what type of application you deploy.
If something doesn't work in production you can pull the docker image by the digest and run it locally to debug and try to understand where is the problem. If you need to ssh to a production server it means that you automation pipeline have failed or maybe your are not even using one...

Tools like Webpack compile Javascript applications to static files that can then be served with your choice of HTTP server. Once you’ve built your SPA, the built files are indistinguishable from pages like index.html and other assets like image files: they’re just static files that get served by some HTTP server.
A Docker container encapsulates a single running process. It doesn’t really do a good job at containing these static files per se.
You’ll frequently see “SPA Docker containers” that run a developer-oriented HTTP server. There’s no particular benefit to doing this, though. You can get an equally good developer experience just by developing your application locally, running npm run build or whatever to create a dist directory, and then publishing that the same way you’d publish other assets. An automation pipeline is helpful here, but this isn’t a task Docker makes wildly simpler.
(Also remember when you do this that the built application runs on the user’s browser. That means it can’t see any of the Docker-internal networking machinery: it can’t use the Docker-internal IP addresses and it can’t use the built-in Docker DNS service. Everything it reaches has to be on docker run -p published ports and it has to use a DNS name that reaches the host. The browser literally has no idea Docker is involved in this at all.)

There are a few benefits.
Firstly, building a Docker image means you are explicitly stating what your application's canonical run-time is - this version of nginx, with that SSL configuration, whatever. Changes to the run-time are in source control, so you can upgrade predictably and reversibly. You say you don't want "the latest version" - but what if that latest version patches a critical security vulnerability? Being able to upgrade predictably, on "disposable" containers means you upgrade when you want to.
Secondly, if the entire development team uses the same Docker image, you avoid the challenges with different configurations giving the "it works on my machine" response to bugs - in SPAs, different configurations of nginx can lead to different behaviour. New developers who join the team don't have to install or configure anything, and can use any device they want - they can be certain that what runs in Docker is the same as it is for all the other developers.
Thirdly, by having all your environments containerized (not just development, but test and production), you make it easy to move versions through the pipeline and only change the environment-specific values.
Now, for an SPA, these benefits are real, but may not outweigh the cost and effort of creating and maintaining Docker images - inevitably, the Docker image becomes a bottleneck and the first thing people blame. I'd only invest in it if you see lots of environment-specific pain (suggesting having a consistent run-time environment is necessary), or if you see lots of "it works on my machine" type of bug.

Related

Hosting multiple Single Page Apps with Docker

We have a couple of single page apps that we want to host on a single web server. I'm only talking about the frontend part (Angular, React). The APIs run elsewhere. Each app is basically just a directory with a collection of static files (js, html, css, etc.) generated by the CI process. In fact, the build process creates one Docker image per app. Each image basically just contains a directory that contains the build artifacts.
All apps should appear in different folders on the same website:
/app1
/app2
/app3
What would be the best practice for deploying the apps? We've come up with a few strategies.
1. A single image / container
We could build a final web server image (e.g. Apache) and merge all the directories from the app images into it.
Cons: Versioning sounds like hell. Each new version of an app causes a new version of the final image. What if we want to revert to an older version of an app while a newer version of another app has already been deployed?
2. Multiple containers with a front-end reverse proxy
We could build each app image with its own built-in web server. And then route them all together with a front-end reverse proxy (nginx, traefik, etc.).
Cons: Waste of resources running multiple web servers.
3. One web server container and multiple data-only containers for the apps
Deploy each app in a separate container that provides it's app directory as a volume but does nothing else. Then there is a separate web server container that shares the same volumes in order to have access to all the files.
So far I like the 3rd variant best. Whenever a new version of an app needs to be deployed, we simply do a Docker pull on a new version of its image. But it still seems hacky. Volumes must be deleted manually. Otherwise the volume will not be seeded with the new content. Also having containers that do nothing isn't the Docker way, isn't it?
A Docker container wraps a process, but your compiled front-end applications are static files. That is, the setup you're describing here doesn't really match Docker's model.
Without Docker you could imagine deploying these to a single directory
/var/www/
app1/
index.html
css/app.css
app2/
index.html
css/app2.css
js/main.js
and serve these with a single HTTP server; you would not typically run a separate server for each front-end application.
A totally reasonable option, in fact, is to completely ignore Docker here. Even if your back-end applications are being served from containers, you can publish your front-end code (again, compiled to static files) via whatever hosting service you have conveniently available. Things like Webpack's file hashing can help support deploying updated versions of the application without breaking existing clients.
If I was using Docker I'd use either of your first two options but not the third. Running a combined all-the-front-ends HTTP server is the same pattern already discussed, except the HTTP server is in a container instead of the host. Running a dedicated HTTP server for each front-end application lets you use Docker's image versioning, and the incremental cost of an additional HTTP server isn't that expensive.
I would avoid any approach that involves named volumes or "data-only containers". Nothing ever automatically copies content into a volume, except for one specific corner case (on native Docker only, using named volumes but not any other kind of mount, only the first time you use a volume but never updating the volume content), and so you'd have to manually write code to copy content out of an image into a shared hosting location; that's more complicated and doesn't really gain you anything over directly running Webpack on the host.

How to use docker in the development phase of a devops life cycle?

I have a couple of questions related to the usage of Docker in a development phase.
I am going to propose three different scenarios of how I think Docker could be used in a development environment. Let's imagine that we are creating a REST API in Java and Spring Boot. For this I will need a MySQL database.
The first scenario is to have a docker-compose for development with the MySQL container and a production docker-compose with MySQL and the Java application (jar) in another container. To develop I launch the docker-compose-dev.yml to start only the database. The application is launched and debugged using the IDE, for example, IntelliJ Idea. Any changes made to the code, the IDE will recognize and relaunch the application by applying the changes.
The second scenario is to have, for both the development and production environment, a docker-compose with the database and application containers. That way, every time I make a change in the code, I have to rebuild the image so that the changes are loaded in the image and the containers are lauched again. This scenario may be the most typical and used for development with Docker, but it seems very slow due to the need to rebuild the image every time there is a change.
The third scenario consists of the mixture of the previous two. Two docker-compose. The development docker-compose contains both containers, but with mechanisms that allow a live reload of the application, mapping volumes and using, for example, Spring Dev Tools. In this way, the containers are launched and, in case of any change in the files, the application container will detect that there is a change and will be relaunched. For production, a docker-compose would be created simply with both containers, but without the functionality of live reload. This would be the ideal scenario, in my opinion, but I think it is very dependent on the technologies used since not all allow live reload.
The questions are as follows.
Which of these scenarios is the most typical when using Docker for phase?
Is scenario 1 well raised? That is, dockerize only external services, such as databases, queues, etc. and perform the development and debugging of the application with the IDE without using Docker for it.
The doubts and the scenarios that I raise came up after I raised the problem that scenario 2 has. With each change in the code, having to rebuild the image and start the containers again is a significant waste of time. In short, a question would be: How to avoid this?
Thanks in advance for your time.
NOTE: It may be a question subject to opinion, but it would be nice to know how developers usually deal with these problems.
Disclaimer: this is my own opinion on the subject as asked by Mr. Mars. Even though I did my best to back my answer with actual sources, it's mostly based on my own experience and a bit of common sense
Which of these scenarios is the most typical when using Docker for development?
I have seen all 3 scenarios iin several projects, each of them with their advantages and drawbacks. However I think scenario 3 with a Docker Compose allowing for dynamic code reload is the most advantageous in term of flexibility and consistency:
Dev and Prod Docker Compose are close matches, meaning Dev environment is as close as possible to Prod environment
You do not have to rebuild the image constantly when developping, but it's easy to do when you need to
Lots of technologies support such scenario, such as Spring Dev Tools as you mentionned, but also Python Flask, etc.
You can easily leverage Docker Compose extends a.k.a configuration sharing mechanism (also possible with scenario 2)
Is scenario 1 well raised? That is, dockerize only external services, such as databases, queues, etc. and perform the development and debugging of the application with the IDE without using Docker for it.
Scenario 1 is quite common, but the IDE environment would probably be different than the one from the Docker container (and it would be difficult to maintain a match of version for each libs, dependencies, etc. from IDE environment to Docker environment). It would also probably require to go through an intermediate step between Dev and Production to actually test the Docker image built after Dev is working before going to Production.
In my own experience doing this is great when you do not want to deal too much with Docker when actually doing dev and/or the language or technology you use is not adapted for dynamic reload as described in scenario 3. But in the end it only adds a drift between your environments and more complexity between Dev and Prod deployment method.
having to rebuild the image and start the containers again is a significant waste of time. In short, a question would be: How to avoid this?
Beside the scenarios you describe, you have ways to decently (even drastically) reduce image build time by leveraging Docker build cache and designing your Dockerfile. For example, a Python application would typically copy code as the last (or almost last) step of the build to avoid invalidating the cache, and for Java app it would be possible to split code so as to avoid compiling the entire application everytime a bit of code changes - that would depend on your actual setup.
I personally use a workflow roughly matching scenario 3 such as:
a docker-compose.yml file corresponding to my Production environment
a docker-compose.dev.yml which will override some aspect of my main Docker Compose file such as mouting code from my machine, adding dev specific flags to commands, etc. - it would be run such as
docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.dev.yml
but it would also be possible to have a docker-compose.override.yml as Docker Compose uses by default for override
in some situation I would have to use other overrides for specific situations such as docker-compose.ci.yml on my CI, but usually the main Docker Compose file is enough to describe my Prod environment (and if that's not the case, docker-compose.prod.yml does the trick)
I've seen them all used in different scenarios. There are some gotchas to avoid:
Applications inside of a container shouldn't depend on something running outside of a container on the host. So all of your dependencies should be containerized first.
File permissions with host volumes can be complicated depending on your version of docker. Some of the newer Docker Desktop installs automatically handle uid mappings, but if you develop directly on Linux you'll need to ensure the containers run as the same uid as your host user.
Avoid making changing inside the container if that isn't mapped into a host volume, since those changes will be lost when the container is recreated.
Looking at each of the options, here's my assessment of each:
Containerizing just the DB: This works well when developers already have a development environment for the language of choice, and there's no risk of external dependencies creeping in, e.g. a developer upgrading their JDK install to a newer version than the image is built with. It follows the idea of containerizing the dependencies first, while also giving developers the familiar IDE integration with their application.
Rebuilding the Image for Every Change: This tends to be the least ideal for developer workflow, but the quickest to implement when you're not familiar with the tooling. I'll give a 4th option that I consider an improvement to this.
Everything in a container, volume mounts, and live reloading: This is the most complicated to implement, and requires the language itself to support things like live reloading. However, when they do, it is nearly seamless for the developers and gets them up to speed on a new project quickly without needing to install any other tooling to get started.
Rebuild the app in the container with volume mounts: This is a halfway point between 2 and 3. When you don't have live reloading, you likely need to recompile or restart the interpreter to see any change. Rather than rebuilding the image, I put the recompile step in the entrypoint of a development image. I'll mount the code into the container, and run a full JDK instead of just a JRE (or whatever compiler is needed). I use named volumes for any dependency caches so they don't need to download on every restart. Then the method to see the changes is to restart that one container. The steps are identical to a compiled binary outside of a container, stop the old service, recompile, and restart the service, but now it happens inside of a container that should have the same tools used when building the production image.
For option 4, I tend to use a multi-stage build that has stages for build, develop, and release. The build stage pulls in the code and compiles it, the develop stage is the same base image as build but with an entrypoint that does the compile/run, and the release stage copies the result of the build stage into a minimal runtime. Developers then have a compose file for development that creates the development image and runs that with volume mounts and any debugging ports opened.
First of all, docker-compose is just for development and also testing phase, not for production. Example:
With a minimal and basic docker-compose, all your containers will run in the same machine? For development purposes it is ok, but in production, put all the apps in just one machine is a risk
Official link https://docs.docker.com/compose/production/
We will assume
01 java api
01 mysql database
01 web application that needs the api
all of these applications are already in production
Quick Answer
If you need to fix or add new feature to the java api, I advice you to use an ide like eclipse or IntelliJ Idea. Why?
Because java needs compilation.
Compile inside a docker container will take more time due to maven dependencies
IDE has code auto completion
etc
In this development phase, Docker helps you with one of its most powerful features: "Bring the production containers to your localhost". Yeah, in this case, docker-compose.yml is the best option because with one file, you could start everything you need : mysql database and web app but not your java api. Open your java api with your favorite ide.
Anyway if you want to use docker to "develop", you just need the Dockerfile and perform a docker build ... when you need to run your source code in your localhost
Basic Devops Life cycle with docker
Developer push source code changes using git
Your continuous integration (C.I) platform detect this change and perform
docker build ... (In this step, unit test are triggered)
docker push to your private hub. Container is uploaded in this step and will be used to deployments on other servers.
docker run or container deploy to the next environment : testing
Human testers ,selenium or another automation start their work
If no errors are detected, your C.I perform perform a final deploy of the uploaded container to your production environment. No docker build are required, just deploy or docker run.
Some Tips
Docker features are awesome but sometimes add too much complexity. So stop using volumes , hard disk dependency, logs, or complex configurations. If you use volumes, what will happen when your containers are in different hosts?
Java and Nodejs are a stable languages and your rest api or web apps does not need crazy configurations. Just maven compilation and java -jar ... or npm install and npm run start.
For logs you could use https://www.graylog.org/, google stasckdriver or another log management.
And like Heroku, stop using hard disk dependency as much as possible. In heroku platform disk are disposable, it means disappear when app is restarted. So instead of local file storage, you could use another file storage service with a lot of functionalities.
With this approaches, your containers can be deployed anywhere in a simple way
I'm using something similar to your 3rd scenario for my web dev, but it is Node-based. So I have 3 docker-compose files (actually 4, one is base and having all common stuff for others) for dev, staging and production environments.
Staging docker-compose config is similar to production config excluding SSL, ports and other things that may not allow to use it locally.
I have a separate container for each service (like DB, queue), and for dev, I also have additional dev DB and queue containers mostly for running auto-tests. In dev environment, all source are mounted into containers, so it allows to use IDE/editor of choice outside the container, and see changes inside.
I use supervisor to manage my workers inside a container with workers and have some commands to restart my workers manually when I need this. Maybe you can have something similar to recompile/restart your Java app. Or if you have an idea of how to organize app source code changes detection and your app auto-reloading, than could be the best variant. By the way, you gave me an idea to research something similar suitable for my case.
For staging and production environment, my source code is included inside the corresponding container using production Dockerfile. And I have some commands to restart all stuff using an environment I need, and this typically includes rebuilding containers, but because of Docker cache, it doesn't take much time (about 20 seconds). And taking into account that switching between environments is not a too frequent operation I feel quite comfortable with this.
Production docker-compose config is used only during deployment because it enables SSL, proper ports and has some additional production stuff.
Update for details on backend app restarting using Supervisor:
This is how I use it in my projects:
A part of my Dockerfile with installing Supervisor:
FROM node:10.15.2-stretch-slim
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
# Supervisor
supervisor \
...
...
# Configs for services/workers managed by supervisor
COPY some/path/worker-configs/*.conf /etc/supervisor/conf.d/
This is an example of one of Supervisor configs for a worker:
[program:myWorkerName]
command=/usr/local/bin/node /app/workers/my-worker.js
user=root
numprocs=1
stopsignal=INT
autostart=true
autorestart=true
startretries=10
In this example in your case command should run your Java app.
And this is an example of command aliases for convenient managing Supervisor from outside of containers. I'm using Makefile as a universal runner of all commands, but this can be something else.
# Used to run all workers
su-start:
#docker exec -t MY-WORKERS-CONTAINER-NAME supervisorctl start all
# Used to stop all workers
su-stop:
#docker exec -t MY-WORKERS-CONTAINER-NAME supervisorctl stop all
# Used to restart all workers
su-restart:
#docker exec -t MY-WORKERS-CONTAINER-NAME supervisorctl restart all
# Used to check status of all workers
su-status:
#docker exec -t MY-WORKERS-CONTAINER-NAME supervisorctl status
As I described above these Supervisor commands need to be run manually, but I think it is possible to implement maybe another Node-based worker or some watcher outside of a container with workers that will detect file system changes for sources directory and run these commands automatically. I think it is possible to implement something like this using Java as well like this or this.
On the other hand, it needs to be done carefully to avoid constant restarting workers on every little change.

Docker, update image or just use bind-mounts for website code?

I'm using Django but I guess the question is applicable to any web project.
In our case, there are two types of codes, the first one being python code (run in django), and others are static files (html/js/css)
I could publish new image when there is a change in any of the code.
Or I could use bind mounts for the code. (For django, we could bind-mount the project root and static directory)
If I use bind mounts for code, I could just update the production machine (probably with git pull) when there's code change.
Then, docker image will handle updates that are not strictly our own code changes. (such as library update or new setup such as setting up elasticsearch) .
Does this approach imply any obvious drawback?
For security reasons is advised to keep an operating system up to date with the last security patches but docker images are meant to be released in an immutable fashion in order we can always be able to reproduce productions issues outside production, thus the OS will not update itself for security patches being released. So this means we need to rebuild and deploy our docker image frequently in order to stay on the safe side.
So I would prefer to release a new docker image with my code and static files, because they are bound to change more often, thus requiring frequent release, meaning that you keep the OS more up to date in terms of security patches without needing to rebuild docker images in production just to keep the OS up to date.
Note I assume here that you release new code or static files at least in a weekly basis, otherwise I still recommend to update at least once a week the docker images in order to get the last security patches for all the software being used.
Generally the more Docker-oriented solutions I've seen to this problem learn towards packaging the entire application in the Docker image. That especially includes application code.
I'd suggest three good reasons to do it this way:
If you have a reproducible path to docker build a self-contained image, anyone can build and reproduce it. That includes your developers, who can test a near-exact copy of the production system before it actually goes to production. If it's a Docker image, plus this code from this place, plus these static files from this other place, it's harder to be sure you've got a perfect setup matching what goes to production.
Some of the more advanced Docker-oriented tools (Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, Docker Swarm, Hashicorp Nomad, ...) make it fairly straightforward to deal with containers and images as first-class objects, but trickier to say "this image plus this glop of additional files".
If you're using a server automation tool (Ansible, Salt Stack, Chef, ...) to push your code out, then it's straightforward to also use those to push out the correct runtime environment. Using Docker to just package the runtime environment doesn't really give you much beyond a layer of complexity and some security risks. (You could use Packer or Vagrant with this tool set to simulate the deploy sequence in a VM for pre-production testing.)
You'll also see a sequence in many SO questions where a Dockerfile COPYs application code to some directory, and then a docker-compose.yml bind-mounts the current host directory over that same directory. In this setup the container environment reflects the developer's desktop environment and doesn't really test what's getting built into the Docker image.
("Static files" wind up in a gray zone between "is it the application or is it data?" Within the context of this question I'd lean towards packaging them into the image, especially if they come out of your normal build process. That especially includes the primary UI to the application you're running. If it's things like large image or video assets that you could reasonably host on a totally separate server, it may make more sense to serve those separately.)

How to simply use docker for deployment?

Docker seems to be the incredible new tool to solve all developer headaches when it comes to packaging and releasing an application, yet i'm unable to find simple solutions for just upgrading a existing application without having to build or buy into whole "cloud" systems.
I don't want any kubernetes cluster or docker-swarm to deploy hundreds of microservices. Just simply replace an existing deployment process with a container for better encapsulation and upgradability.
Then maybe upgrade this in the future, if the need for more containers increases so manual handling would not make sense anymore
Essentially the direct app dependencies (Language and Runtime, dependencies) should be bundled up without the need to "litter" the host server with them.
Lower level static services, like the database, should still be in the host system, as well as a entry router/load-balancer (simple nginx proxy).
Does it even make sense to use it this way? And if so, is there any "best practice" for doing something like this?
Update:
For the application i want to use it on, i'm already using Gitlab-CI.
Tests are already run inside a docker environment via Gitlab-CI, but deployment still happens the "old way" (syncing the git repo to the server and automatically restarting the app, etc).
Containerizing the application itself is not an issue, and i've also used full docker deployments via cloud services (mostly Heroku), but for this project something like this is overkill. No point in paying hundreds of $$ for a cloud server environment if i need pretty much none of the advantages of it.
I've found several of "install your own heroku" kind of systems but i don't need or want to manage the complexity of a dynamic system.
I suppose basically a couple of remote bash commands for updating and restarting a docker container (after it's been pushed to a registry by the CI) on the server, could already do the job - though probably pretty unreliably compared to the current way.
Unfortunately, the "best practice" is highly subjective, as it depends entirely on your setup and your organization.
It seems like you're looking for an extremely minimalist approach to Docker containers. You want to simply put source code and dependencies into a container and push that out to a system. This is definitely possible with Docker, but the manner of doing this is going to require research from you to see what fits best.
Here are the questions I think you should be asking to get started:
1) Is there a CI tool that will help me package together these containers, possibly something I'm already using? (Jenkins, GitLab CI, CircleCI, TravisCI, etc...)
2) Can I use the official Docker images available at Dockerhub (https://hub.docker.com/), or do I need to make my own?
3) How am I going to store Docker Images? Will I host a basic Docker registry (https://hub.docker.com/_/registry/), or do I want something with a bit more access control (Gitlab Container Registry, Harbor, etc...)
That really only focuses on the Continuous Integration part of your question. Once you figure this out, then you can start to think about how you want to deploy those images (Possibly even using one of the tools above).
Note: Also, Docker doesn't eliminate all developer headaches. Does it solve some of the problems? Absolutely. But what Docker, and the accompanying Container mindset, does best is shift many of those issues to the left. What this means is that you see many of the problems in your processes early, instead of those problems appearing when you're pushing to prod and you suddenly have a fire drill. Again, Docker should not be seen as a solve-all. If you go into Docker thinking it will be a solve-all, then you're setting yourself up for failure.

Docker for non-code deployments?

I am trying to help a sysadmin group reduce server & service downtime on the projects they manage. Their biggest issue is that they have to take down a service, install upgrade/configure, and then restart it and hope it works.
I have heard that docker is a solution to this problem, but usually from developer circles in the context of deploying their node/python/ruby/c#/java, etc. applications to production.
The group I am trying to help is using vendor software that requires a lot of configuration and management. Can docker still be used in this case? Can we install any random software on a container? Then keep that in a private repository, upgrade versions, etc.?
This is a windows environment if that makes any difference.
Docker excels at stateless applications. You can use it for persistent data style applications, but requires the use of volume commands.
Can docker still be used in this case?
Yes, but it depends on the application. It should be able to be installed headless, and a couple other things that are pretty specific. (EG: talking to third party servers to get an license can create issues)
Can we install any random software on a container?
Yes... but: remember that when the container restarts, that software will be gone. It's better to create it as an image, and then deploy it.See my example below.
Then keep that in a private repository, upgrade versions, etc.?
Yes.
Here is an example pipeline:
Create a Dockerfile for the OS and what steps it takes to install the application. (Should be headless)
Build the image (at this point, it's called an image, not a container)
Test the image locally by creating a local container. This container is what has the configuration data such as environment variables, the volumes for persistent data it needs, etc.
If it satisifies the local developers wants, then you can either:
Let your build servers create the image and publish it an internal
docker registry (best practice)
Let your local developer publish it
to an internal docker registry
At that point, your next level environments can then pull down the image from the docker registry, configure them and create the container.
In short, it will require a lot of elbow grease but is possible.
Can we install any random software on a container?
Generally yes, but you can have many problems with legacy software which was developed to work on bare metal.
At first it can be persistence problem, but it can be solved using volumes.
At second program that working good on full OS can work not so good in container. Containers have some difference with VM's or bare metal. For example due to missing init process some containers have zombie process issue. About others difference you can read here
Docker have big profit for stateless apps, but some heave legacy apps can work not so good inside containers and should be tested good before using it in production.

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