Last week Docker announced the availablity of Docker Enterprise Edition. The existing version of Docker that I’ve been using has now been renamed to the Docker Community Edition.

So what does this mean for us Windows people hacking around with Docker on our local Windows 10 boxes? Very little it seems. The Community Edition will have access to the full Docker platform and (if needed) can be added to with paid-for addons from the Docker cloud. I haven’t had a chance to look over all the paid offerings but they seem to be mainly cloud based services, so I doubt I’ll need them (at the moment).

The Enterprise Edition is interesting as it raises the question, is Docker suitable for SQL Server in production environments? Now, I’m a big fan of Docker and have been using it extensively in my dev/test environments but I’m still not sure about production.

If you think about the advantages running SQL Server in containers brings; simple to setup, quick to deploy; are they relevant to production? I want to spend time setting up my 24/7 critical SQL Server instance, speed of build doesn’t really matter.

There may be other advantages that Docker Enterprise Edition brings so I’m definitely going to check it out but there’ll have to be something pretty good in there to convince me SQL Server containers are for production.

Have a good week!