Containerization

• Docker got you down? We can help with that.
• Is your containerization setup worse than what you had before? We can help with that.
• Got expensive somehow? We can help with that.
• Images somehow 8GB? We can help with that.
• Builds taking longer than lunch? We can help with that.

Docker promised to end "works on my machine" — by shipping "my machine." For a lot of teams, that trade came with a handful of new problems: bloated images, twenty-minute builds, developer environments that somehow still don't match prod, and a Dockerfile that grew organically over four years of tribal knowledge. If your containerization story is measurably worse than the deploy process it replaced, you're in good company. It's also fixable.

Most Dockerfiles are wrong in the same handful of ways. Layer order that busts the cache on every commit. Build tooling left in the final image. Secrets baked in where a docker history can find them. Base images nobody's audited since the team's first prototype. We do a clean, opinionated pass — the kind of review a senior engineer does in twenty minutes and a team argues about for three months.

Builds should be fast or explainable. BuildKit, layer caching, multi-stage boundaries, and remote build caches exist for a reason, and most teams have turned on exactly one of them. We design pipelines that actually exploit the cache, keep CI spend sane, and stop punishing people for touching the Dockerfile.

Dev and prod should look alike — or the drift should be deliberate. We help teams build local environments (compose files, devcontainers, or lighter-weight options) that match the production container's surface closely enough that bugs stop being location-dependent. When divergence is the right call, we make it an explicit, documented one instead of an accident.

Supply chain is a real threat surface. Public base images, untrusted layers, unsigned tags, and mutable latest references are how modern compromises spread. We set up signing, scanning, internal mirrors, and registry policies that fit your team's size — not a Fortune-100 security theater program that nobody will follow.

And somewhere along the way, it got expensive. Docker Desktop licensing quietly turned into a six-figure line item for a lot of mid-sized orgs. Docker Hub pull limits pushed teams into paid tiers they didn't budget for. Registry storage, cross-region egress, and CI minutes burned on cache-busting rebuilds add up fast — and none of it shows up on the invoice labeled "Docker." We help teams find the actual cost surface: licensing, registry bills, CI spend, and the wall-clock time that engineers burn waiting on slow builds. Often the fix is layered — swap Docker Desktop for a lighter runtime where it makes sense, host your own registry mirror, fix the Dockerfile so the cache actually works, and reclaim the CI minutes you were paying for twice.

And sometimes the answer is less Docker. Not every workload benefits from being containerized. We'll tell you when a container is the wrong envelope — for a CLI, a desktop tool, a cron job, or a stateful service that was running fine before someone decided everything needed a Dockerfile.

This pairs naturally with our Kubernetes work when your containers are headed for a cluster, but plenty of teams need the containerization layer to be healthy on its own — long before orchestration is the question.