If you’re part of our containers preview, you’ll have access to Docker, the container-based software that’s had people buzzing for years, now. Once you’ve gone through the installation and configuration process, you’re ready to start doing some really cool things with your VPS that are only possible because of containers.

Some of these are wildly impractical, others are exceedingly so, and some are simply experiments that we’d love to see others push to new heights.

1. Create highly disposable dev/testing environments

We know that many SSD Nodes customers use their VPSs as a place to test software and learn new things in a clean environment that won’t mess up their main machine. A VPS is a pretty cheap and effective educational tool if someone wants to know more about Linux administration or the fundamentals of deploying code to a production server.

But it can also be a pain to repeatedly rebuild your VPS and start clean because, while experimenting, you made some change that breaks everything. Instead, why not use Docker to create a highly disposable, isolated environment to play around in?

Take the xeyes Dockerfile from above and expand it until you’ve created a development environment that’s to your exacting standards. Choose the base OS, the software you want to install (vim or emacs or nano, anyone?), and build the image with docker build -t mydev, replacing mydev with any name you’d like. Then, you can spin up as many instances as you want with docker run -it mydev, which will kick you right into a shell to get started.

If something goes terribly wrong inside the container, simply disconnect and destroy it.