A Basic introduction to Docker and Containers

If you're a programmer you must have heard about the "Virtual Machine". It Isolates an application into the self-contained unit with its dependencies. Similarly "Docker" is the most popular and helpful tool amongst the developers for packaging, shipping, and running applications.

What is Docker?

Docker is an open-source project for simplifying and automating the project deployment of applications as a portable containers that can run easily on servers. Docker was first introduced in 2013 as an open source project named "dotCloud". The key benefit of it is that it allows users to create a package of its application with all of its dependencies in a unit (Container) for software development. Unlike virtual machine, docker is capable of managing system resources efficiently.

What are containers?

Containers and Virtual machines share their goal that is to isolate an application and its dependencies.
The main concept which makes difference between the containers and VM is that containers share their host system's kernel with other containers.

Why Docker is getting popular ??

1. Ease of use:  Developers, system admins. architects and other's are taking advantage of containers to make their build and test their portable application. It made it easier for anyone to package an application and run it on anywhere.
2. Speed: Containers share the host system kernel that's why they are lightweight and fast. They take fewer resources of the system. That's why we can build, deploy and run a container in seconds as compared to Virtual machines which take longer. 
3. Docker Hub: A good community always benefits its ecosystem. Docker hub which we can say an App store for Docker Images for users. Docker hub has tens of thousands of public images created by their community members which are available for use. All you need to pull down the image and use with little no- modification.
4. Modularity and Scalability: Scalability is always a major point of discussion for any project, but when we are using docker it makes it easy to break our applications core functionality into several individual containers and run together without any errors. 

Docker is also easy to update any minor to major changes into its application. you can install docker easily from here