The use of Docker in modern software development

Docker is an open source virtualization technology known as a platform for software containers. With the help of these containers, it is possible to bundle an entire application, complete with its own filesystem, into a single, reproducible unit. Born out of open source collaboration, Docker containers helped revolutionize the software development world. Software can function uniformly across various hosting systems by being housed in shells of code called containers that contain all the resources it needs to execute on a server, including tools, runtime, system libraries, and more (e.g. AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Apache).

Docker advantages

• Portability Across Machines. You may deploy your containerized program to any other system that runs Docker after testing it. You can be confident that it will perform precisely as it did during the test.

• Lightweight. Although virtual machines are an alternative to containers, containers do not contain an operating system (whereas virtual machines do), which implies that containers have a considerably smaller footprint and are faster to construct and start than virtual machines.

• Isolation. Docker containers are completely self-contained. This also implies that, as you progress through the stages of your development lifecycle, you can be confident that a picture you create during development will operate identically in testing and in front of your users.

• Scalability. You can use a variety of container management techniques and technologies to handle multiple containers at the same time (e.g. Kubernetes).

Containers vs. Virtual Machines

 Containers and virtual machines have similar resource isolation and allocation benefits, but function differently because containers virtualize the operating system instead of hardware and they are more portable and efficient.

• Containers

  Containers are an abstraction at the app layer that packages code and dependencies together. Multiple containers can run on the same machine and share the OS kernel with other containers, each running as isolated processes in user space. Containers take up less space than VMs (container images are typically tens of MBs in size), can handle more applications and require fewer VMs and Operating systems.

• Virtual Machines

  Virtual machines (VMs) are an abstraction of physical hardware turning one server into many servers. The hypervisor allows multiple VMs to run on a single machine. Each VM includes a full copy of an operating system, the application (necessary binaries and libraries) taking up tens of GBs, so they can be slower to boot.