I’m just starting to learn about Docker and was thinking of leveraging the technology for one of the Windows desktop application that we use. So basically I’m just here to figure out whether Docker is the correct solution to our use case.
We have a Windows desktop application developed by a third party vendor that connects to our Oracle database. We regularly receive updates to the application via an installer that we also test to make sure it works for our needs because we’re not the only clients they have so some of the changes may not work for us and may break some of our workflow.
Since this is a Windows application, we initially had issues with some of our users who use Macs but we solved this by using Microsoft’s RemoteApp. Basically we created a remote Windows Server and installed the application there. Everyone will have to connect to the remote server to open the application (it might look like it’s running locally but in reality you are doing a remote desktop connection).
We created three environments: production, staging, and test. Sometimes we’d get errors on our production server but we’re unable to reproduce on our test and staging environments, sometimes we would run out of licenses (CALs) to use RemoteApp, other times we see a different behavior in the application depending on which environment we’re running it from, etc. Sad to say things have not been running smoothly and I’d like to improve our situation that’s why I’m looking at Docker to help with making sure the ecosystem that the application is running in will always be the same from the moment we test it all the way to production.
I’m planning on wrapping the desktop application in a Docker container that has all of the dependencies bundled in and just ship the container to our users. That way regardless of whether they have a Windows machine or a Mac, they’d still get the same experience and wouldn’t need to connect to a remote server.
Is this something Docker can help us with?