Introduction to containers

A container is a form of operating system virtualization, and it has been a very popular computing platform for software deployment and running modern software based on micro-services architecture. A container allows you to package and run computer software with isolated dependencies. Compared to server virtualization, such as Amazon EC2 or VMware virtual machines, containers are more lightweight and portable, as they share the same operating system and do not contain operating system images in each container. Each container has its own filesystem, shares of computing resources, and process space for the custom applications running inside it.

While containers may seem like a relatively new transformative technology, the concept of containerization technology was actually born in the 1970s with the chroot system and Unix Version 7. However, container technology did not gain much attraction in the software development community for the next two decades...