Containerization using Docker. Docker is the containerization platform which is used to package your application and all its dependencies together in the form of containers so to make sure that your application works seamlessly in any environment which can be development or test or production.Docker is a tool designed to make it easier to create, deploy, run applications by using containers.
Docker significantly improves development, deployment, and distribution of software products and platforms.
Docker is popular because it has revolutionized development. Docker, and the containers it makes possible, has revolutionized the software industry and in five short years their popularity as a tool and platform has skyrocketed. The main reason is that containers create vast economies of scale.
You should learn Docker because Docker is the tool that developers are all using locally to build, manage, and distribute containers. If someone asks you to work on a project that uses containers, they will most likely want you to use Docker locally.
Running applications in containers brings a number of benefits:
Portability
Once you have tested your containerized application you can deploy it to any other system where Docker is running and you can be sure that your application will perform exactly as it did when you tested it.
Performance
Although virtual machines are an alternative to containers, the fact that containers do not contain an operating system (whereas virtual machines do) means that containers have much smaller footprints than virtual machines, are faster to create, and quicker to start.
Agility
The portability and performance benefits offered by containers can help you make your development process more agile and responsive. Enhancing your continuous integration and continuous delivery processes to take advantage of containers and technology such as Enterprise Developer Build Tools for Windows makes it easier for you to deliver the right software at the right time. Enterprise Developer Build Tools for Windows is a component of Enterprise Developer which provides all of the functionality of Enterprise Developer to enable you to compile, build, and test COBOL code but without the overhead of an IDE.
Isolation
A Docker container that contains one of your applications also includes the relevant versions of any supporting software that your application requires. If other Docker containers contain applications that require different versions of the same supporting software, that isn't a problem because the different Docker containers are totally independent of one other.
This also means that as you move through the various stages of your development lifecycle, you can have total confidence that an image you create during development will perform exactly the same as it moves through testing and potentially to your users.
Scalability
You can quickly create new containers if demand for your applications requires them. When using multiple containers you can take advantage of a range of container management options. See the Docker documentation for more information on these options.
