Understanding Docker

Docker is an open-source project primarily run by a company of the same name. The technology was created to help organizations redistribute Web applications and the components those applications require across servers in a reliable and reproducible way while requiring less overhead and providing faster deployment than using virtual machines. Web applications, like the popular WordPress publishing platform, are ideal candidates for Docker-based deployment.

To use Docker, developers create Docker images containing the files for their applications. Docker images are read-only and are contained within ZIP files. A command line–based Docker client resides on each target computer and retrieves the image from a Docker registry (which is not related to the Windows Registry). The client is used solely for management and can be used to access multiple images. Redistributing applications as images results in a consistent starting point for developers, testers, or administrators to deploy or update applications as compared to complex installation scripts or installers with multiple steps.