Best Practices to Manage Docker Versions

There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. In this talk we’ll tackle the naming, specially, Docker version naming. Labels, Tags, Checksums . . . how should you use these things to keep track of docker versions?

There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. In this talk we’ll tackle the naming, specially, Docker version naming. Labels, Tags, Checksums . . . how should you use these things to keep track of docker versions? What about dev vs. prod images, how best to distinguish those? What about the ‘latest’ tag? What about cleanup? Could we do more? Versioning often seems like a simple problem, but when you have a tool that gives you as much power and flexibility as docker does, it often helps to develop guidelines. This will examine the various tools available for managing docker containers in a registry, and some simple patterns you can use in various use cases for CI/CD to keep track of your containers.

It might sounds ridiculous, but it’s a huge problem for thousands of our customers that use Docker. When there are so many ways to do the same thing, what is the right one? And Docker doesn’t make it easy for us, think about “latest” for example, the name implies it refers to latest version, but it can refer to anything.