Building containers with Docker

The Docker project was released in 2013 and gained popularity quickly, surpassing that of OpenVZ and LXC. Large production deployments now run Docker, with various orchestration frameworks, such as Apache Mesos and Kubernetes, offering Docker integration.

Unlike LXC and OpenVZ, Docker is better suited for running single applications in a minimal container setup. It uses Docker Engine daemon, which controls the containerd process for managing the life cycle of the containers, thus making it harder to integrate with other init systems such as systemd.

Docker exposes a convenient API that various tools use, and makes it easy to provision containers from prebuilt images, hosted either on remote public or private repositories/registries.

We can run LXC and Docker containers on the same host without any problems, as they have clear separation. In the next section, we are going to explore most of Docker's features, by examining the life cycle of a Docker...