  Docker technology has been increasingly used among software developers in a
multitude of projects. This growing interest is due to the fact that Docker
technology supports a convenient process for creating and building containers,
promoting close cooperation between developer and operations teams, and
enabling continuous software delivery. As a fast-growing technology, it is
important to identify the Docker-related topics that are most popular as well
as existing challenges and difficulties that developers face. This paper
presents a large-scale empirical study identifying practitioners' perspectives
on Docker technology by mining posts from the Stack Overflow (SoF) community.
Method: A dataset of 113,922 Docker-related posts was created based on a set of
relevant tags and contents. The dataset was cleaned and prepared. Topic
modelling was conducted using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), allowing the
identification of dominant topics in the domain. Our results show that most
developers use SoF to ask about a broad spectrum of Docker topics including
framework development, application deployment, continuous integration,
web-server configuration and many more. We determined that 30 topics that
developers discuss can be grouped into 13 main categories. Most of the posts
belong to categories of application development, configuration, and networking.
On the other hand, we find that the posts on monitoring status, transferring
data, and authenticating users are more popular among developers compared to
the other topics. Specifically, developers face challenges in web browser
issues, networking error and memory management. Besides, there is a lack of
experts in this domain. Our research findings will guide future work on the
development of new tools and techniques, helping the community to focus efforts
and understand existing trade-offs on Docker topics.
