Docker containers have reshaped the way people think about developing, deploying, and maintaining software. Drawing on the native isolation capabilities of modern operating systems, containers support VM-like separation of concerns, but with far less overhead and far greater flexibility of deployment than hypervisor-based virtual machines.

Containers are so lightweight and flexible, they have given rise to new application architectures. The new approach is to package the different services that constitute an application into separate containers, and to deploy those containers across a cluster of physical or virtual machines. This gives rise to the need for container orchestration—a tool that automates the deployment, management, scaling, networking, and availability of container-based applications.

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