Containers have been the future for five years now, featured on the stage of every major distributed systems conference in the world. But beyond the hype and the swag is a real technical solution, with real technical challenges, used for real problems at scale. And for the companies and engineers looking to adopt this solution, there’s little content on what awaits them.

In this talk, we’ll discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of running containers, in production, at scale. We’ll address why to use containers, why not to, and the tradeoffs required at both the technical and human levels for implementing them. You will walk away with a better understanding of how containers could fit into your own architecture and what you’ll need to do to make that rollout a reality. Containers can be a great infrastructure solution, but no one should drive them without a manual.

Alice Goldfuss is a systems punk currently helping GitHub run their cutting-edge container platform. She loves kernel crashes, memory design, and performance hacks. 🌈 💾

Alice has consulted on some