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What 's the big deal with Docker?


G+_Ben Yanke
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What's the big deal with Docker?

 

I've read lots of things about how much people love it, including an occasional mention from Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ, but I have yet to find a simple article on why it's so useful and what's so great about it, and how to easily start out with it.

 

Anyone have any good resources? I've been running VMs, VPSes (ubuntu server) and webservers for over a year for several clients, and I'm nearly finished with my CS undergrad, so I have enough knowledge to wrap my head around something technical, but I'm just not "getting" Docker.

 

Ideas?

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Eddie Foy 

 

Ah! So it's like a VM, but without the overhead of running a full OS?

 

I run 5 Ubuntu server VMs at home, because I want to be able to easily start and stop each one, have some separation between them, and roll back to previous states independent of the others (since I do a lot of learning by experimentation and messing up things in the process).

 

Would I be able to do something similar in Docker, but only run one OS instances instead of 5?

 

This already sounds cool.

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For most software shops the big advantage is that the devs can work from a pre-configured container and add their requirements for libraries 3rd party software etc. Then when they go to production it doesn't matter which os (for the most part) that they deploy to, as the dependencies are baked into the container.

 

So they can deploy a webapp without worrying about the diffs between the dev host OS and the final production host OS. Also, unlike some VMs, the containers run with full performance of the underlying hardware platform. There's no abstraction layers.

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