What are Containers?
Learn about Docker containers and how they work.
We'll cover the following...
Containers
Recall how you could use a Virtual Machine (VM) to install a web application and its dependencies. VM software such as VMware and VirtualBox are known as hypervisors.
They allow you to create a new virtual machine, then install an appropriate operating system with the required application stack (web server, runtimes, databases, etc.):
In some cases, it may not be possible to install all applications in a single VM so multiple VMs become necessary.
Each VM is a full OS running on emulated hardware in a host OS with access to resources such as networks via the hypervisor. This is a considerable overhead, especially when a dependency could be tiny.
Docker launches each dependency in a separate container. It helps to think of a container as a mini VM ...