In a way, Docker containers are the lightweight, loosely-coupled, and nimble cousins of VMs. As elucidated before, containers enable packaging an application along with all of its dependencies compactly and shipping it elsewhere, running it smoothly in development, test, and production environments. Docker harnesses some powerful kernel-level features intelligently and provides a growing ecosystem of tools for realizing and running containers in an automated fashion. The end result is a potential game-changer for distributed application developers and system administrators. With hybrid clouds as the toast of worldwide enterprises for their IT needs, the Docker platform is a blessing in disguise for enterprise IT teams. Containers are typical sandboxes, isolating processes from each other. Docker does a nice and neat job of advancing the containerization paradigm for a slew of purposes such as lightweight packaging, frictionless shipping, faster deployment, and more rapid delivery of software applications.

The next chapter throws more light on the operational aspects of Docker containers, especially the sagacious handling of containers in order to produce real-world Dockerized applications.