Introducing Docker

Resource and time sharing are not new and were generally believed to originate in the IBM mainframe days of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Virtualization was made possible for organizations and individuals to use a computer resource without owning one. The capacity of a single server is so large that it is almost impossible for the majority of general-purpose workloads to effectively use it, so shared use among a large group of applications and users makes sense. The goal was to increase the efficiency of the users and the expensive computer resources they shared and this paved the road to virtualization. Containers are a form of operating system virtualization. There are a set of characteristics which makes containers attractive, especially in deploying microservice based applications, which we will look into in this Chapter.