Intro to Containers

While preparing for an upcoming technical interview, I decided to take a look into Docker and what it is all about. I quickly came to realize that to understand Docker, I first had to understand containers and what role they played in web development.

What is a Container?

Containers provide a standard way to package your application’s code, configurations, and dependencies into a single object. By containerizing your application, you’re building a package that holds not only your application but all of the dependencies needed for that application to run. A container is a process that is isolated from other processes. Containers are assigned resources that no other process can access, and they cannot access any resources not explicitly assigned to them. Containers share an operating system installed on the server and run as resource-isolated processes, ensuring quick, reliable, and consistent deployments, regardless of the environment.

Why use Containers?

Some benefits of containerizing your applications are they package your code with the config files and dependencies it needs to consistently run in any environment. Each container runs as a separate process that shares the resources of the underlying operating system. This enables containers to start and stop quickly. Containers provide process isolation that lets you granularly set memory utilization for better use of computing resources.