All stacks · Platform & IaC
Local stacks, image discipline, and the unit of pipeline compute.
DockerA Friday CI green on python:3.11-slim:latest became a Saturday outage when prod pulled a new digest. Pin the bytes, promote the same image, and stop treating Compose as Kafka.
AirflowExtract from an API, transform with pandas, load to a warehouse — scheduled in Airflow with retries, idempotency, and a local Docker setup.
Docker is the unit of local and CI compute for pipelines: the image that runs the DAG, the dbt job, and the Playwright-less SQL test. Image discipline — pin bases, do not copy secrets, keep layers small — is the production skill, not “I ran postgres in compose.”
For local and many batch jobs on ECS/Cloud Run/batch, yes. Kubernetes is orchestration of containers, not a requirement to use images.
A small set of blessed images beats 40 snowflake Dockerfiles. Add a package when the team needs it, not per-DAG art.
Because someone ran it on the runner’s Python. The job should run the same image in CI and prod. That is the whole point.
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