Learn what a container is

Mondo Education Updated on 2024-01-28

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What is a container

Containers are lightweight, portable, and isolated software environments that allow developers to run and package applications and their dependencies consistently across different platforms. They help streamline application development, deployment, and management, ensuring that applications run consistently, regardless of changes in the underlying infrastructure.

How containers work

Unlike virtualization, where hardware resources emulate a full operating system, containers share the host's operating system kernel and leverage lightweight virtualization technology to create isolated processes. There are several benefits to using containers: Efficient: Containers have less overhead than virtual machines and share common libraries and executables, allowing more containers to run on a single host.

Portability: Containers encapsulate applications and their dependencies, making it easy to move and run them consistently across different environments and platforms.

Fast start-up: Because containers don't need to start a full operating system, they start and shut down much faster than virtual machines.

Consistency: Containers provide a consistent environment for the development, testing, and production phases of an application, reducing the "program runs fine on my machine" problem.

Containers and docker

Docker is an open-source platform that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of applications by isolating them into lightweight, portable containers. It provides development and management with a set of tools and APIs to manage containerized applications, and Docker allows you to build and package applications**, libraries, and dependencies into a container image that can be consistently distributed and run in any environment that supports Docker.

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