The benefit of containers

Customers often ask these questions when it comes to containers:

• Why do we need containers when we have instances?
• Don't instances already provide us with a level of isolation from the underlying hardware?

While the preceding questions are valid, several benefits accrue from using a system such as Docker. One of the key benefits of Docker is that it allows you to fully utilize your virtual machine resources by hosting multiple applications (on distinct ports) in the same instance.

Docker uses certain features of the Linux kernel, namely kernel namespaces and groups, to achieve complete isolation between each Docker process, as indicated in the following architecture diagram:

Container layer in application infrastructure

As shown in the preceding diagram, it's possible to run two or more applications that require different versions of the Java runtime on the same machine, as each Docker container has its version of Java and the associated libraries...