Running Docker on VMware / vSphere (VSX, etc.) in your own datacenter:
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Still depends on your hardware (if the server dies, the VM dies, containers die).
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Still depends on your VMware infrastructure (and VMware itself can crash or have bugs).
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You add another layer of complexity (VMware licensing, management, maintenance).
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Disaster recovery is slower and more manual compared to cloud-native setups.
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Scaling is painful — buying new hardware, provisioning, etc.
You don’t magically get cloud resilience just by putting Docker on top of VMware.
Running Docker in the cloud (AWS EC2, GCP, Azure, etc.):
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Underlying hardware issues are the cloud provider’s problem, not yours.
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Instance failures → cloud automatically replaces them.
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You can scale horizontally (more hosts) and scale vertically (bigger hosts) easily.
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Backup, snapshots, recovery → instant.
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Plus you get access to managed container services (ECS, EKS, GKE, AKS) if you want even more automation.
In short:
Docker on VMware = a bit of lipstick on a pig 🐷💄
Docker in the cloud = true scalability and resilience 🚀🛡️
If you find a company running Docker hosts on bare metal or VMware with hundreds or thousands of containers on each machine:
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Every kernel update is a potential mass-extinction event.
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Every hardware issue (disk, CPU, RAM) can kill hundreds or thousands of services at once.
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Scaling is painful and manual.
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Disaster recovery is slow and risky.
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Monitoring and troubleshooting become nightmares — one crash = massive chaos.
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Security risks are higher because everything is jammed together and hard to isolate cleanly.
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You will be constantly firefighting instead of building things.
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You will have endless maintenance windows, downtime, stress, and pager alerts.
✅ Conclusion:
If you find this setup → RUN. 🏃💨
Your life as an engineer will be miserable there.
Good companies spread the risk, automate scaling, design for resilience — they don’t stack containers like Jenga towers. 🧱
Docker / Container Red Flags:
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❌ „We run hundreds or thousands of containers per Docker host.„
→ Means they stack containers dangerously, single point of failure. -
❌ „Our Docker hosts are on bare metal.„
→ Means no hardware fault tolerance. -
❌ „We use VMware for Docker hosts.„
→ Means they think virtualization magically solves container issues (it doesn’t). -
❌ „Kernel updates are rare / manual / scary.„
→ Means containers are tightly tied to an unstable foundation. -
❌ „Scaling? We just add bigger servers.„
→ Vertical scaling = disaster scaling. -
❌ „Our disaster recovery is… well, backups.„
→ No fast recovery plan = you’re screwed during an outage. -
❌ „We don’t use Kubernetes, ECS, EKS, or anything like that.„
→ Means they manually herd containers, like cavemen with sticks. -
❌ „Containers sometimes crash, and we just reboot the host.„
→ Huge operational pain, no proper health checks or orchestration.
✅ Green Flags you want to hear:
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„We spread containers over many small instances.“
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„We use managed services (EKS, GKE, ECS).“
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„We have automated health checks, rolling updates, blue/green deployments.“
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„We can lose a node and nobody notices.“
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„Scaling is just config — no manual interventions.“