Docker: Up & Running

Chapter 5. Working with Docker Containers

In the previous chapter, we learned how to build a Docker image and the very basic steps required for running the resulting image within a container. In this chapter, we’ll first take a look at where containers came from and then dive deeper into containers and the Docker commands that control the overall configuration, resources, and privileges that your container receives.

What Are Containers?

You might be familiar with virtualization systems like VMware or Xen that allow you to run a complete Linux kernel and operating system on top of a virtualized layer, commonly called a hypervisor. This approach provides very strong isolation between virtual machines because each hosted kernel sits in separate memory space and has defined entry points into the actual hardware, either through another kernel or something that looks like hardware.

Containers are a fundamentally different approach where all containers share a single kernel and isolation is implemented entirely within that single kernel. This is called operating system virtualization. The libcontainer project gives a good, short definition of a container: “A container is a self-contained execution environment that shares the kernel of the host system and which is (optionally) isolated from other containers in the system.” The major advantages are around efficiency of resources because you don’t need a whole operating system for each isolated function. Since you are sharing a kernel, ...