It's been almost three years since Gilt embarked on adopting containers, first using LXC in our physical data-centre in Japan, and then adopting Docker on a mix of physical hardware and virtual machines in Amazon. We've used Docker for continuous, repeatable, immutable deployments of our applications and services; we've used Docker for repeatable build systems, we've also used Docker as a foundational part of the distributed job system 'SunDial' that powers our personalisation and recommendation systems. Now, as we enter Gilt's next stage in evolution as part of Hudson Bay Company (HBC), we're realising the value of having standardised containers that can be deployed easily across private cloud, public cloud, and traditional data-centre infrastructure.

The dust has settled, and now container technology is moving from early-adopters to mainstream. In this talk, I'll provide detailed examples of how we've used Docker and where container technology has given us most bang for buck and, pragmatically, what aspects of the technology haven't panned out as we thought they would.