Chapter 1. Welcome to Docker
This chapter covers
- What Docker is
- Example: “Hello, World”
- An introduction to containers
- How Docker addresses software problems that most people tolerate
- When, where, and why you should use Docker
A best practice is an optional investment in your product or system that should yield better outcomes in the future. Best practices enhance security, prevent conflicts, improve serviceability, or increase longevity. Best practices often need advocates because justifying the immediate cost can be difficult. This is especially so when the future of the system or product is uncertain. Docker is a tool that makes adopting software packaging, distribution, and utilization best practices cheap and sensible defaults. It does so by providing a complete vision for process containers and simple tooling for building and working with them.
If you’re on a team that operates service software with dynamic scaling requirements, deploying software with Docker can help reduce customer impact. Containers come up more quickly and consume fewer resources than virtual machines.
Teams that use continuous integration and continuous deployment techniques can build more expressive pipelines and create more robust functional testing environments if they use Docker. The containers being tested hold the same software that will go to production. The results are higher production change confidence, tighter production change control, and faster iteration.