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Long gone are the days of Linux container management, with the rapid increase in popularity of cloud technology we know that we need more robust solutions for containerization of our apps along with all the tools needed for their management and docker is our best bet to achieve this. 🔥<span class="codex-editor__fake-cursor"></span>

Compute resources are the backbone of the cloud. On AWS (amazon web services) we have Amazon Elastic Compute engine (EC2) which allows us to launch virtual machines in the cloud and make scale computing easier for developers.

Similarly, in Google Cloud Platform we can create virtual machines with the compute engine.

We choose an operating system and also other resources like RAM and the number of CPUs for that virtual machine. Cloud services provide us with all the necessary tools to manage our virtual machines and provide security to them.

The biggest problem with running virtual machines(VM) is scalability. For e.g. Imagine that the app you built on the VM, gains popularity and its users increase so much that they max out the CPU and memory of the VM.

One option is to make the VM more powerful by adding more CPUs and memory to the VM. This is called Vertical Scaling.

The other option is to create more VM’s and distribute the workload among them. This is known as horizontal scaling.

With horizontal scaling comes the problem of load balancing i.e. one VM gets most of the traffic while others just sit idle.

Containerization lets us free of worrying about scaling our infrastructure at all

Containerization is defined as a form of operating system virtualization, through which applications are run in isolated user spaces called containers, all using the same shared operating system (OS). Every container is isolated from the other.

A container is a standard unit of software that packages up code and all its dependencies so the application runs quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another.

I know you might be thinking that they both sound the same, but there are major differences under the hood:

How the containers work is a more complicated concept, and here I’m not going into that.

Docker allows the developers to put their applications in a container and then deploy it to any cloud service. The clouds have container registries where we can upload our containers and use them across different services.

Docker hub is a service provided by Docker for finding and sharing container images with your team. It provides the following major features:

Overall Docker is an awesome tool that makes a developer’s life easier and more productive. There are tools like Kubernetes which organizes our containers into groups of pods and can automatically scale those pods based upon the amount of traffic or utilization. While the developers can sit back and have a cup of coffee.

I highly encourage you to use docker in your projects as well. 💯

Long gone are the days of Linux container management, say hello to Docker.Long gone are the days of Linux container management, say hello to Docker.

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An Introduction to docker 🐋

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Vishesh Dhawan