Enterprise Docker

Chapter 1. Understanding Docker

If you’re reading this book, you have probably heard of Docker. It is the most popular container platform available today—and the one that is doing the most to reshape the way organizations handle IT workloads. Indeed, if you do anything related to IT, it’s hard not to have heard of Docker by now.

But do you understand why Docker has become so popular so quickly? Do you know which types of challenges Docker can solve for an enterprise (by which I mean large-scale organizations with complex computing needs)? Are you familiar with the different sets of tasks—from running a container, to managing a container cluster, to monitoring containerized applications—that are necessary to deploy Docker in production within an enterprise environment?

This chapter provides an introduction to these topics by explaining the basics of how Docker works, briefly discussing the history of Docker, and analyzing where Docker fits within the broader ecosystem of container technologies. Subsequent chapters delve deeper into Docker’s functionality, compare Docker to virtual machines, explain how to plan a Docker migration, and discuss other types of container and microservices technologies that can help enterprises achieve a new level of efficiency in their IT operations.

How Docker Containers Work

Let’s start with an overview of Docker containers.

Application Containers

The first thing to know about Docker is that it is an application-container platform. An application ...