Container is not a new term; it has been there since long. Containers are evolving during this time. They are lightweight OS virtualization. Containers are run on a host OS, which uses and shares resources from the host kernel. Each container is run in isolation, but they share underlying operating system resources though a layer. Containers come with their own benefits:

• Lightweight
• High performance and speed
• Ship infrastructure with code
• Support microservice architecture
• Lesser portability issues
• Simplifies DevOps

Some organizations have their own version of containers. BSD has a jail command which is a type of container they have been using for a while now. Also, Solaris Zones, and Google control groups were already having a flavor of container service , since long a long time. Docker is the most adopted container technology by the community. So, it has given standardization to containers. As it is a container, it inherits all the benefits that are mentioned for containers. Docker is a lightweight layer and sits over the host OS. Initially Docker used the Linux container components (LXC). However, now, they are on using runC. Here are a few main components of Docker.