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Docker: Accelerated Container Application Development

June 12, 2024

Install from a single package to get up and running in minutes. Code and test locally while ensuring consistency between development and production. This command shows us the machine states of the application. The application will now start and provide us with a primary and straightforward API. Security was also the main selling point for Docker alternatives, particularly CoreOS’ rkt, pronounced rocket.

  • And finally, the pieces that allow all these items to speak is networking.
  • The Docker Hub is a repository of free public images that you can freely download and run on your personal computer.
  • Those of you who have experience running services in production know that usually apps nowadays are not that simple.
  • Containers share resources with other containers in the same host OS and provide OS-level process isolation.

Containerd is the core container runtime of the Docker Engine. Virtual machines (VMs) are an abstraction of physical hardware turning one server into many servers. The hypervisor allows multiple VMs to run on a single machine.

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The complexity surrounding containerized workloads requires implementing and maintaining security controls that safeguard containers and their underlying infrastructure. Docker container security practices are designed to protect containerized applications from risks like security breaches, malware and bad actors. The OCI consists of leading companies, including Docker, IBM and Red Hat®. It supports innovation while helping organizations avoid vendor lock-in. Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration platform descended from Borg, a project developed for internal use at Google. In 2015, Google donated Kubernetes to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)9, the open source, vendor-neutral hub of cloud-native computing.

But before we start, we need to make sure the ports and names are free. So if you have the Flask and ES containers running, lets turn them off. The next step usually is to write the commands of copying the files and installing the dependencies.

What is Docker Compose?

The management and creation of isolated, lightweight containers are enabled by docker. These containers encapsulate the dependencies of an application and make sure that it is consistent across multiple environments. Due to docker, the applications can be broken down into smaller, manageable components. The deployment and development of microservices-based architectures are facilitated by docker.

what is docker used for

Docker lets developers access these native containerization capabilities by using simple commands and automate them through a work-saving application programming interface (API). Throughout this tutorial, we’ve worked with readymade docker images. While we’ve built images from scratch, we haven’t touched any application code yet and mostly restricted ourselves to editing Dockerfiles and YAML configurations. One thing that you must be wondering is how does the workflow look during development? Is one supposed to keep creating Docker images for every change, then publish it and then run it to see if the changes work as expected? In the last section, we saw how easy and fun it is to run applications with Docker.

Docker advantages and disadvantages

Our flask app was unable to run since it was unable to connect to Elasticsearch. How do we tell one container about the other container and get them to talk to each other? Once you done basking in the glory of your app, remember to terminate the environment so that you don’t end up getting charged for extra resources. The file should be pretty self-explanatory, but you can always reference the official documentation for more information. We provide the name of the image that EB should use along with a port that the container should open. To publish, just type the below command remembering to replace the name of the image tag above with yours.

what is docker used for

After that the docker server will use it to create an instance of a container, and we know that a container is an instance of an image, its sole purpose is to run one very specific program. So the docker server then essentially took that image file from image cache and loaded it up into memory to created a container out of it and then ran a single program inside of it. And that single programs purpose was to print out the message that you see.

What are Containers?

By this, I mean that we want to work with one or perhaps two unique projects and let the rest of our applications move to the cloud. We tend to break these applications into isolated and encapsulated components that don’t share resources. This dividing process creates a Dockerfile and an application-based build definition deployed using tools like Docker Compose. Containers are an abstraction at the app layer that packages code and dependencies together. Multiple containers can run on the same machine and share the OS kernel with other containers, each running as isolated processes in user space. Containers take up less space than VMs (container images are typically tens of MBs in size), can handle more applications and require fewer VMs and Operating systems.

what is docker used for

A Dockerfile is a simple text file that contains a list of commands that the Docker client calls while creating an image. The best part is that the commands you write in a Dockerfile are almost identical docker what is it to their equivalent Linux commands. This means you don’t really have to learn new syntax to create your own dockerfiles. In 2013, Docker introduced what would become the industry standard for containers.

The Docker platform

Now that we have everything setup, it’s time to get our hands dirty. In this section, we are going to run a Busybox container on our system and get a taste of the docker run command. Due to these benefits, containers (& Docker) have seen widespread adoption.

what is docker used for

If you haven’t done that yet, please go ahead and create an account. The docker build command is quite simple – it takes an optional tag name with -t and a location of the directory containing the Dockerfile. The image that we are going to use is a single-page website that I’ve already created for the purpose of this demo and hosted on the registry – prakhar1989/static-site. We can download and run the image directly in one go using docker run. Containers share resources with other containers in the same host OS and provide OS-level process isolation. The Dockerfile is responsible for configuring our production environment.

And it does all of this while using simple concepts that we’ll explore in the next sections. Docker didn’t add much to the container runtimes at the time – the greatest contribution from Docker to the container ecosystem was the awareness. Its easy-to-use CLI and concepts democratized the use of containers to common developers, and not only to deep hacking companies that needed containers for some reason. It was, at the time, the first and most complete implementation of a container management system. It used control groups, namespaces, and a lot of what was built until then. The greatest advancement was that it was used straight from a Unix kernel, it didn’t require any patches.

what is docker used for