Deploying Python applications with Docker

Docker offers another way to bundle Python code with software written in other languages. The idea behind Docker is that instead of packaging and installing your application onto a preconfigured server environment, you build and ship a container image with your application and all its runtime dependencies. A container image is more like a virtual environment than a virtual machine. A virtual machine is a complete system image including a kernel and an operating system. A container image is a minimal user space environment that only comes with the binaries needed to run your application.

Virtual machines run on top of a hypervisor that emulates hardware. Containers run directly on top of the host operating system. Unlike virtual machines, containers are able to share the same operating system and kernel without the use of hardware emulation. Instead, they rely on two special features of the Linux kernel for isolation: namespaces and cgroups...