Docker 101

Docker is an open platform for developing, shipping, and running applications. Docker is designed to deliver your applications faster. With Docker you can separate your applications from your infrastructure AND treat your infrastructure like a managed application. Docker helps you ship code faster, test faster, deploy faster, and shorten the cycle between writing code and running code.

Docker does this by combining a lightweight container virtualization platform with workflows and tooling that help you manage and deploy your applications.

At its core, Docker provides a way to run almost any application securely isolated in a container. The isolation and security allow you to run many containers simultaneously on your host. The lightweight nature of containers, which run without the extra load of a hypervisor, means you can get more out of your hardware.

Surrounding the container virtualization are tooling and a platform which can help you in several ways:

getting your applications (and supporting components) into Docker containers
distributing and shipping those containers to your teams for further development and testing
deploying those applications to your production environment, whether it be in a local data center or the Cloud.