A book published in 1981, called Nailing Jelly to a Tree, describes software as “nebulous and difficult to get a firm grip on.” That was true in 1981, and it is no less true nearly four decades since. Software, whether it is an application you bought or one that you built yourself, remains hard to deploy, hard to manage, and hard to run.

Docker containers provide a way to get a grip on software. You can use Docker to wrap up an application in such a way that its deployment and runtime issues—how to expose it on a network, how to manage its use of storage and memory and I/O, how to control access permissions—are handled outside of the application itself, and in a way that is consistent across all “containerized” apps. You can run your Docker container on any OS-compatible host (Linux or Windows) that has the Docker runtime installed.

To read this article in full, please click here