Docker For Dummies: Simplified

Docker the big buzz word these days, so what is it? In simple terms, it is a platform for building, running and shipping applications in a consistent manner.

Have you come across this common problem where you application works on your machine, but doesn’t work on other machines?

This may be due to a few reasons stated below:

• One or more files are not included as part of your deployment
• Target machine running different version of software than what the application needs
• Configuration settings are different in different machines

With these issues that many of us face, Docker was introduced to the world.

With docker, we can easily package our application with everything it needs (3rd party libraries, environmental variables, application files, cut-down OS, etc) and run it anywhere, on any machine with Docker. For example: If some joins your team they don’t have to spend days setting up a new machine to run the application. Docker will automatically download and run the application with the provided dependencies inside an isolated environment called a container.

What is a container?

This isolated environment called a container, allows multiple versions of the same software run side by side. You might have this question, how are virtual machines different from containers.

A virtual machine is a full blown operating system and is slow to start and is resource intensive unlike Docker container, which is light weight and requires less hardware resources.

Docker Architecture: Docker uses a client server architecture. The client component talks to the server component through a RESTful API

Now enough of explanation, let’s get started with installing Docker for your machine. Go to the following link and get started with Docker: https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/