Before we roll our sleeves up and get stuck in with Docker Machine, we should take a moment to discuss what place it occupies in the overall Docker ecosystem.
Docker Machine's biggest strength is that it provides a consistent interface to several public cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as self-hosted virtual machine/cloud platforms, including OpenStack, and VMware vSphere. Finally, the following locally-hosted hypervisors are supported, such as Oracle VirtualBox and VMware Workstation or Fusion.
Being able to target all of these technologies using a single command with minimal user interaction is a very big time saver if you need to quickly access a Docker host in Amazon Web Services one day and then DigitialOcean the next—you know you are going to get a consistent...
