How is Docker different from a virtual machine

Question

I keep rereading the Docker documentation to try to understand the difference between Docker and a full VM  How does it manage to provide a full filesystem  isolated networking environment  etc  without being as heavy   Why is deploying software to a Docker image  if that s the right term  easier than simply deploying to a consistent production environment

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Good answers  Just to get an image representation of container vs VM  have a look at the one below      Source

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I have used Docker in production environments and staging very much  When you get used to it you will find it very powerful for building a multi container and isolated environments   Docker has been developed based on LXC  Linux Container  and works perfectly in many Linux distributions  especially Ubuntu   Docker containers are isolated environments  You can see it when you issue the top command in a Docker container that has been created from a Docker image   Besides that  they are very light-weight and flexible thanks to the dockerFile configuration   For example  you can create a Docker image and configure a DockerFile and tell that for example when it is running then wget  this   apt-get  that   run  some shell script   setting environment variables and so on   In micro-services projects and architecture Docker is a very viable asset  You can achieve scalability  resiliency and elasticity with Docker  Docker swarm  Kubernetes and Docker Compose   Another important issue regarding Docker is Docker Hub and its community  For example  I implemented an ecosystem for monitoring kafka using Prometheus  Grafana  Prometheus-JMX-Exporter  and Docker   For doing that  I downloaded configured Docker containers for zookeeper  kafka  Prometheus  Grafana and jmx-collector then mounted my own configuration for some of them using YAML files  or for others  I changed some files and configuration in the Docker container and I build a whole system for monitoring kafka using multi-container Dockers on a single machine with isolation and scalability and resiliency that this architecture can be easily moved into multiple servers   Besides the Docker Hub site there is another site called quay io that you can use to have your own Docker images dashboard there and pull push to from it  You can even import Docker images from Docker Hub to quay then running them from quay on your own machine   Note  Learning Docker in the first place seems complex and hard  but when you get used to it then you can not work without it   I remember the first days of working with Docker when I issued the wrong commands or removing my containers and all of data and configurations mistakenly

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Docker isn t a virtualization methodology  It relies on other tools that actually implement container-based virtualization or operating system level virtualization  For that  Docker was initially using LXC driver  then moved to libcontainer which is now renamed as runc  Docker primarily focuses on automating the deployment of applications inside application containers  Application containers are designed to package and run a single service  whereas system containers are designed to run multiple processes  like virtual machines  So  Docker is considered as a container management or application deployment tool on containerized systems   In order to know how it is different from other virtualizations  let s go through virtualization and its types  Then  it would be easier to understand what s the difference there   Virtualization  In its conceived form  it was considered a method of logically dividing mainframes to allow multiple applications to run simultaneously  However  the scenario drastically changed when companies and open source communities were able to provide a method of handling the privileged instructions in one way or another and allow for multiple operating systems to be run simultaneously on a single x86 based system   Hypervisor  The hypervisor handles creating the virtual environment on which the guest virtual machines operate  It supervises the guest systems and makes sure that resources are allocated to the guests as necessary  The hypervisor sits in between the physical machine and virtual machines and provides virtualization services to the virtual machines  To realize it  it intercepts the guest operating system operations on the virtual machines and emulates the operation on the host machine s operating system    The rapid development of virtualization technologies  primarily in cloud  has driven the use of virtualization further by allowing multiple virtual servers to be created on a single physical server with the help of hypervisors  such as Xen  VMware Player  KVM  etc   and incorporation of hardware support in commodity processors  such as Intel VT and AMD-V   Types of Virtualization  The virtualization method can be categorized based on how it mimics hardware to a guest operating system and emulates a guest operating environment  Primarily  there are three types of virtualization    Emulation  Paravirtualization  Container-based virtualization   Emulation  Emulation  also known as full virtualization runs the virtual machine OS kernel entirely in software  The hypervisor used in this type is known as Type 2 hypervisor  It is installed on the top of the host operating system which is responsible for translating guest OS kernel code to software instructions  The translation is done entirely in software and requires no hardware involvement  Emulation makes it possible to run any non-modified operating system that supports the environment being emulated   The downside of this type of virtualization is an additional system resource overhead that leads to a decrease in performance compared to other types of virtualizations     Examples in this category include VMware Player  VirtualBox  QEMU  Bochs  Parallels  etc   Paravirtualization  Paravirtualization  also known as Type 1 hypervisor  runs directly on the hardware  or    bare-metal     and provides virtualization services directly to the virtual machines running on it  It helps the operating system  the virtualized hardware  and the real hardware to collaborate to achieve optimal performance  These hypervisors typically have a rather small footprint and do not  themselves  require extensive resources   Examples in this category include Xen  KVM  etc     Container-based Virtualization  Container-based virtualization  also known as operating system-level virtualization  enables multiple isolated executions within a single operating system kernel  It has the best possible performance and density and features dynamic resource management  The isolated virtual execution environment provided by this type of virtualization is called a container and can be viewed as a traced group of processes      The concept of a container is made possible by the namespaces feature added to Linux kernel version 2 6 24  The container adds its ID to every process and adding new access control checks to every system call  It is accessed by the clone   system call that allows creating separate instances of previously-global namespaces    Namespaces can be used in many different ways  but the most common approach is to create an isolated container that has no visibility or access to objects outside the container  Processes running inside the container appear to be running on a normal Linux system although they are sharing the underlying kernel with processes located in other namespaces  same for other kinds of objects  For instance  when using namespaces  the root user inside the container is not treated as root outside the container  adding additional security    The Linux Control Groups  cgroups  subsystem  the next major component to enable container-based virtualization  is used to group processes and manage their aggregate resource consumption  It is commonly used to limit the memory and CPU consumption of containers   Since a containerized Linux system has only one kernel and the kernel has full visibility into the containers  there is only one level of resource allocation and scheduling   Several management tools are available for Linux containers  including LXC  LXD  systemd-nspawn  lmctfy  Warden  Linux-VServer  OpenVZ  Docker  etc    Containers vs Virtual Machines  Unlike a virtual machine  a container does not need to boot the operating system kernel  so containers can be created in less than a second  This feature makes container-based virtualization unique and desirable than other virtualization approaches   Since container-based virtualization adds little or no overhead to the host machine  container-based virtualization has near-native performance  For container-based virtualization  no additional software is required  unlike other virtualizations   All containers on a host machine share the scheduler of the host machine saving need of extra resources   Container states  Docker or LXC images  are small in size compared to virtual machine images  so container images are easy to distribute   Resource management in containers is achieved through cgroups  Cgroups does not allow containers to consume more resources than allocated to them  However  as of now  all resources of host machine are visible in virtual machines  but can t be used  This can be realized by running top or htop on containers and host machine at the same time  The output across all environments will look similar   Update   How does Docker run containers in non-Linux systems   If containers are possible because of the features available in the Linux kernel  then the obvious question is how do non-Linux systems run containers  Both Docker for Mac and Windows use Linux VMs to run the containers  Docker Toolbox used to run containers in Virtual Box VMs  But  the latest Docker uses Hyper-V in Windows and Hypervisor framework in Mac   Now  let me describe how Docker for Mac runs containers in detail    Docker for Mac uses https   github com moby hyperkit to emulate the hypervisor capabilities and Hyperkit uses hypervisor framework in its core  Hypervisor framework is Mac s native hypervisor solution  Hyperkit also uses VPNKit and DataKit to namespace network and filesystem respectively    The Linux VM that Docker runs in Mac is read-only  However  you can bash into it by running   screen   Library Containers com docker docker Data vms 0 tty   Now  we can even check the Kernel version of this VM     uname -a Linux linuxkit-025000000001 4 9 93-linuxkit-aufs  1 SMP Wed Jun 6 16 86 64 Linux   All containers run inside this VM   There are some limitations to hypervisor framework  Because of that Docker doesn t expose docker0 network interface in Mac  So  you can t access containers from the host  As of now  docker0 is only available inside the VM   Hyper-v is the native hypervisor in Windows  They are also trying to leverage Windows 10 s capabilities to run Linux systems natively

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Docker encapsulates an application with all its dependencies   A virtualizer encapsulates an OS that can run any applications it can normally run on a bare metal machine

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It might be helpful to understand how virtualization and containers work at a low level  That will clear up lot of things  Note  I m simplifying a bit in the description below  See references for more information  How does virtualization work at a low level  In this case the VM manager takes over the CPU ring 0  or the  quot root mode quot  in newer CPUs  and intercepts all privileged calls made by the guest OS to create the illusion that the guest OS has its own hardware  Fun fact  Before 1998 it was thought to be impossible to achieve this on the x86 architecture because there was no way to do this kind of interception  The folks at VMware were the first who had an idea to rewrite the executable bytes in memory for privileged calls of the guest OS to achieve this  The net effect is that virtualization allows you to run two completely different OSes on the same hardware  Each guest OS goes through all the processes of bootstrapping  loading kernel  etc  You can have very tight security  For example  a guest OS can t get full access to the host OS or other guests and mess things up  How do containers work at a low level  Around 2006  people including some of the employees at Google implemented a new kernel level feature called namespaces  however the idea long before existed in FreeBSD   One function of the OS is to allow sharing of global resources like network and disks among processes  What if these global resources were wrapped in namespaces so that they are visible only to those processes that run in the same namespace  Say  you can get a chunk of disk and put that in namespace X and then processes running in namespace Y can t see or access it  Similarly  processes in namespace X can t access anything in memory that is allocated to namespace Y  Of course  processes in X can t see or talk to processes in namespace Y  This provides a kind of virtualization and isolation for global resources  This is how Docker works  Each container runs in its own namespace but uses exactly the same kernel as all other containers  The isolation happens because the kernel knows the namespace that was assigned to the process and during API calls it makes sure that the process can only access resources in its own namespace  The limitations of containers vs VMs should be obvious now  You can t run completely different OSes in containers like in VMs  However you can run different distros of Linux because they do share the same kernel  The isolation level is not as strong as in a VM  In fact  there was a way for a  quot guest quot  container to take over the host in early implementations  Also you can see that when you load a new container  an entire new copy of the OS doesn t start like it does in a VM  All containers share the same kernel  This is why containers are light weight  Also unlike a VM  you don t have to pre-allocate a significant chunk of memory to containers because we are not running a new copy of the OS  This enables running thousands of containers on one OS while sandboxing them  which might not be possible if we were running separate copies of the OS in their own VMs

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Docker  basically containers  supports OS virtualization i e  your application feels that it has a complete instance of an OS whereas VM supports hardware virtualization  You feel like it is a physical machine in which you can boot any OS  In Docker  the containers running share the host OS kernel  whereas in VMs they have their own OS files  The environment  the OS  in which you develop an application would be same when you deploy it to various serving environments  such as  quot testing quot  or  quot production quot   For example  if you develop a web server that runs on port 4000  when you deploy it to your  quot testing quot  environment  that port is already used by some other program  so it stops working  In containers there are layers  all the changes you have made to the OS would be saved in one or more layers and those layers would be part of image  so wherever the image goes the dependencies would be present as well  In the example shown below  the host machine has three VMs  In order to provide the applications in the VMs complete isolation  they each have their own copies of OS files  libraries and application code  along with a full in-memory instance of an OS   Whereas the figure below shows the same scenario with containers  Here  containers simply share the host operating system  including the kernel and libraries  so they don   t need to boot an OS  load libraries or pay a private memory cost for those files  The only incremental space they take is any memory and disk space necessary for the application to run in the container  While the application   s environment feels like a dedicated OS  the application deploys just like it would onto a dedicated host  The containerized application starts in seconds and many more instances of the application can fit onto the machine than in the VM case   Source  https   azure microsoft com en-us blog containers-docker-windows-and-trends

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1  Lightweight  This is probably the first impression for many docker learners    First  docker images are usually smaller than VM images  makes it easy to build  copy  share   Second  Docker containers can start in several milliseconds  while VM starts in seconds   2  Layered File System  This is another key feature of Docker  Images have layers  and different images can share layers  make it even more space-saving and faster to build   If all containers use Ubuntu as their base images  not every image has its own file system  but share the same underline ubuntu files  and only differs in their own application data   3  Shared OS Kernel  Think of containers as processes   All containers running on a host is indeed a bunch of processes with different file systems  They share the same OS kernel  only encapsulates system library and dependencies    This is good for most cases no extra OS kernel maintains  but can be a problem if strict isolations are necessary between containers   Why it matters   All these seem like improvements  not revolution  Well  quantitative accumulation leads to qualitative transformation   Think about application deployment  If we want to deploy a new software service  or upgrade one  it is better to change the config files and processes instead of creating a new VM  Because Creating a VM with updated service  testing it share between Dev  amp  QA   deploying to production takes hours  even days  If anything goes wrong  you got to start again  wasting even more time  So  use configuration management tool puppet  saltstack  chef etc   to install new software  download new files is preferred   When it comes to docker  it s impossible to use a newly created docker container to replace the old one  Maintainance is much easier Building a new image  share it with QA  testing it  deploying it only takes minutes if everything is automated   hours in the worst case  This is called immutable infrastructure  do not maintain upgrade  software  create a new one instead   It transforms how services are delivered  We want applications  but have to maintain VMs which is a pain and has little to do with our applications   Docker makes you focus on applications and smooths everything

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There are three different setups that providing a stack to run an application on  This will help us to recognize what a container is and what makes it so much powerful than other solutions    1  Traditional Servers bare metal  2  Virtual machines  VMs  3  Containers   1  Traditional server stack consist of a physical server that runs an operating system and your application   Advantages           Utilization of raw resources Isolation   Disadvantages     Very slow deployment time Expensive Wasted resources Difficult to scale Difficult to migrate Complex configuration   2  The VM stack consist of a physical server which runs an operating system and a hypervisor that manages your virtual machine  shared resources  and networking interface  Each Vm runs a Guest Operating System  an application or set of applications   Advantages                   Good use of resources Easy to scale Easy to backup and migrate Cost efficiency Flexibility   Disadvantages     Resource allocation is problematic Vendor lockin Complex configuration   3  The Container Setup  the key difference with other stack is container-based virtualization uses the kernel of the host OS to rum multiple isolated guest instances  These guest instances are called as containers  The host can be either a physical server or VM   Advantages    Isolation Lightweight Resource effective Easy to migrate Security Low overhead Mirror production and development environment   Disadvantages     Same Architecture Resource heavy apps Networking and security issues    By comparing the container setup with its predecessors  we can conclude that containerization is the fastest  most resource effective  and most secure setup we know to date  Containers are isolated instances that run your application  Docker spin up the container in a way  layers get run time memory with default storage drivers Overlay drivers  those run within seconds and copy-on-write layer created on top of it once we commit into the container  that powers the execution of containers  In case of VM s that will take around a minute to load everything into the virtualize environment  These lightweight instances can be replaced  rebuild  and moved around easily  This allows us to mirror the production and development environment and is tremendous help in CI CD processes  The advantages containers can provide are so compelling that they re definitely here to stay

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Docker originally used LinuX Containers  LXC   but later switched to runC  formerly known as libcontainer   which runs in the same operating system as its host  This allows it to share a lot of the host operating system resources  Also  it uses a layered filesystem  AuFS  and manages networking   AuFS is a layered file system  so you can have a read only part and a write part which are merged together  One could have the common parts of the operating system as read only  and shared amongst all of your containers  and then give each container its own mount for writing   So  let s say you have a 1 nbsp GB container image  if you wanted to use a full VM  you would need to have 1 nbsp GB x number of VMs you want  With Docker and AuFS you can share the bulk of the 1 nbsp GB between all the containers and if you have 1000 containers you still might only have a little over 1 nbsp GB of space for the containers OS  assuming they are all running the same OS image    A full virtualized system gets its own set of resources allocated to it  and does minimal sharing  You get more isolation  but it is much heavier  requires more resources   With Docker you get less isolation  but the containers are lightweight  require fewer resources   So you could easily run thousands of containers on a host  and it won t even blink  Try doing that with Xen  and unless you have a really big host  I don t think it is possible   A full virtualized system usually takes minutes to start  whereas Docker LXC runC containers take seconds  and often even less than a second   There are pros and cons for each type of virtualized system  If you want full isolation with guaranteed resources  a full VM is the way to go  If you just want to isolate processes from each other and want to run a ton of them on a reasonably sized host  then Docker LXC runC seems to be the way to go   For more information  check out this set of blog posts which do a good job of explaining how LXC works      Why is deploying software to a docker image  if that s the right term  easier than simply deploying to a consistent production environment    Deploying a consistent production environment is easier said than done  Even if you use tools like Chef and Puppet  there are always OS updates and other things that change between hosts and environments   Docker gives you the ability to snapshot the OS into a shared image  and makes it easy to deploy on other Docker hosts  Locally  dev  qa  prod  etc   all the same image  Sure you can do this with other tools  but not nearly as easily or fast   This is great for testing  let s say you have thousands of tests that need to connect to a database  and each test needs a pristine copy of the database and will make changes to the data  The classic approach to this is to reset the database after every test either with custom code or with tools like Flyway - this can be very time-consuming and means that tests must be run serially  However  with Docker you could create an image of your database and run up one instance per test  and then run all the tests in parallel since you know they will all be running against the same snapshot of the database  Since the tests are running in parallel and in Docker containers they could run all on the same box at the same time and should finish much faster  Try doing that with a full VM   From comments        Interesting  I suppose I m still confused by the notion of  snapshot ting  the OS   How does one do that without  well  making an image of the OS    Well  let s see if I can explain  You start with a base image  and then make your changes  and commit those changes using docker  and it creates an image  This image contains only the differences from the base  When you want to run your image  you also need the base  and it layers your image on top of the base using a layered file system  as mentioned above  Docker uses AuFS  AuFS merges the different layers together and you get what you want  you just need to run it  You can keep adding more and more images  layers  and it will continue to only save the diffs  Since Docker typically builds on top of ready-made images from a registry  you rarely have to  snapshot  the whole OS yourself

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In my opinion it depends  it can be seen from the needs of your application  why decide to deploy to Docker because Docker breaks the application into small parts according to its function  this becomes effective because when one application   function is an error it has no effect on other applications   in contrast to using full vm  it will be slower and more complex in configuration  but in some ways safer than docker

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In relation to -      Why is deploying software to a docker image easier than simply   deploying to a consistent production environment      Most software is deployed to many environments  typically a minimum of three of the following    Individual developer PC s  Shared developer environment Individual tester PC s  Shared test environment QA environment UAT environment Load   performance testing Live staging Production Archive   There are also the following factors to consider    Developers  and indeed testers  will all have either subtlely or vastly different PC configurations  by the very nature of the job Developers can often develop on PCs beyond the control of corporate or business standardisation rules  e g  freelancers who develop on their own machines  often remotely  or contributors to open source projects who are not  employed  or  contracted  to configure their PCs a certain way  Some environments will consist of a fixed number of multiple machines in a load balanced configuration Many production environments will have cloud-based servers dynamically  or  elastically   created and destroyed depending on traffic levels   As you can see the extrapolated total number of servers for an organisation is rarely in single figures  is very often in triple figures and can easily be significantly higher still   This all means that creating consistent environments in the first place is hard enough just because of sheer volume  even in a green field scenario   but keeping them consistent is all but impossible given the high number of servers  addition of new servers  dynamically or manually   automatic updates from o s vendors  anti-virus vendors  browser vendors and the like  manual software installs or configuration changes performed by developers or server technicians  etc  Let me repeat that - it s virtually  no pun intended  impossible to keep environments consistent  okay  for the purist  it can be done  but it involves a huge amount of time  effort and discipline  which is precisely why VMs and containers  e g  Docker  were devised in the first place    So think of your question more like this  Given the extreme difficulty of keeping all environments consistent  is it easier to deploying software to a docker image  even when taking the learning curve into account     I think you ll find the answer will invariably be  yes  - but there s only one way to find out  post this new question on Stack Overflow

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With a virtual machine  we have a server  we have a host operating system on that server  and then we have a hypervisor  And then running on top of that hypervisor  we have any number of guest operating systems with an application and its dependent binaries  and libraries on that server  It brings a whole guest operating system with it  It s quite heavyweight  Also there s a limit to how much you can actually put on each physical machine     Docker containers on the other hand  are slightly different  We have the server  We have the host operating system  But instead a hypervisor  we have the Docker engine  in this case  In this case  we re not bringing a whole guest operating system with us  We re bringing a very thin layer of the operating system  and the container can talk down into the host OS in order to get to the kernel functionality there  And that allows us to have a very lightweight container   All it has in there is the application code and any binaries and libraries that it requires  And those binaries and libraries can actually be shared across different containers if you want them to be as well  And what this enables us to do  is a number of things  They have much faster startup time  You can t stand up a single VM in a few seconds like that  And equally  taking them down as quickly   so we can scale up and down very quickly and we ll look at that later on     Every container thinks that it   s running on its own copy of the operating system  It   s got its own file system  own registry  etc  which is a kind of a lie  It   s actually being virtualized

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There are a lot of nice technical answers here that clearly discuss the differences between VMs and containers as well as the origins of Docker   For me the fundamental difference between VMs and Docker is how you manage the promotion of your application   With VMs you promote your application and its dependencies from one VM to the next DEV to UAT to PRD    Often these VM s will have different patches and libraries   It is not uncommon for multiple applications to share a VM  This requires managing configuration and dependencies for all the applications  Backout requires undoing changes in the VM  Or restoring it if possible    With Docker the idea is that you bundle up your application inside its own container along with the libraries it needs and then promote the whole container as a single unit    Except for the kernel the patches and libraries are identical  As a general rule there is only one application per container which simplifies configuration  Backout consists of stopping and deleting the container    So at the most fundamental level with VMs you promote the application and its dependencies as discrete components whereas with Docker you promote everything in one hit   And yes there are issues with containers including managing them although tools like Kubernetes or Docker Swarm greatly simplify the task

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The docker documentation  and self-explanation  makes a distinction between  quot virtual machines quot  vs   quot containers quot   They have the tendency to interpret and use things in a little bit uncommon ways  They can do that because it is up to them  what do they write in their documentation  and because the terminology for virtualization is not yet really exact  Fact is what the Docker documentation understands on  quot containers quot   is paravirtualization  sometimes  quot OS-Level virtualization quot   in the reality  contrarily the hardware virtualization  which is docker not  Docker is a low quality paravirtualisation solution  The container vs  VM distinction is invented by the docker development  to explain the serious disadvantages of their product  The reason  why it became so popular  is that they  quot gave the fire to the ordinary people quot   i e  it made possible the simple usage of typically server     Linux  environments   software products on Win10 workstations  This is also a reason for us to tolerate their little  quot nuance quot   But it does not mean that we should also believe it  The situation is made yet more cloudy by the fact that docker on Windows hosts used an embedded Linux in HyperV  and its containers have run in that  Thus  docker on Windows uses a combined hardware and paravirtualization solution  In short  Docker containers are low-quality  para virtual machines with a huge advantage and a lot of disadvantages

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This is how Docker introduces itself   Docker is the company driving the container movement and the only container platform provider to address every application across the hybrid cloud  Today   s businesses are under pressure to digitally transform but are constrained by existing applications and infrastructure while rationalizing an increasingly diverse portfolio of clouds  datacenters and application architectures  Docker enables true independence between applications and infrastructure and developers and IT ops to unlock their potential and creates a model for better collaboration and innovation   So Docker is container based  meaning you have images and containers which can be run on your current machine  It s not including the operating system like VMs  but like a pack of different working packs like Java  Tomcat  etc  If you understand containers  you get what Docker is and how it s different from VMs    So  what s a container   A container image is a lightweight  stand-alone  executable package of a piece of software that includes everything needed to run it  code  runtime  system tools  system libraries  settings  Available for both Linux and Windows based apps  containerized software will always run the same  regardless of the environment  Containers isolate software from its surroundings  for example differences between development and staging environments and help reduce conflicts between teams running different software on the same infrastructure    So as you see in the image below  each container has a separate pack and running on a single machine share that machine s operating system    They are secure and easy to ship

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Source   Kubernetes in Action

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There are many answers which explain more detailed on the differences  but here is my very brief explanation   One important difference is that VMs use a separate kernel to run the OS  That s the reason it is heavy and takes time to boot  consuming more system resources   In Docker  the containers share the kernel with the host  hence it is lightweight and can start and stop quickly   In Virtualization  the resources are allocated in the beginning of set up and hence the resources are not fully utilized when the virtual machine is idle during many of the times   In Docker  the containers are not allocated with fixed amount of hardware resources and is free to use the resources depending on the requirements and hence it is highly scalable   Docker uses UNION File system    Docker uses a copy-on-write technology to reduce the memory space consumed by containers  Read more here

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I like Ken Cochrane s answer   But I want to add additional point of view  not covered in detail here  In my opinion Docker differs also in whole process  In contrast to VMs  Docker is not  only  about optimal resource sharing of hardware  moreover it provides a  system  for packaging application  preferable  but not a must  as a set of microservices    To me it fits in the gap between developer-oriented tools like rpm  Debian packages  Maven  npm   Git on one side and ops tools like Puppet  VMware  Xen  you name it        Why is deploying software to a docker image  if that s the right term  easier than simply deploying to a consistent production environment    Your question assumes some consistent production environment  But how to keep it consistent  Consider some amount   10  of servers and applications  stages in the pipeline   To keep this in sync you ll start to use something like Puppet  Chef or your own provisioning scripts  unpublished rules and or lot of documentation    In theory servers can run indefinitely  and be kept completely consistent and up to date  Practice fails to manage a server s configuration completely  so there is considerable scope for configuration drift  and unexpected changes to running servers   So there is a known pattern to avoid this  the so called immutable server  But the immutable server pattern was not loved  Mostly because of the limitations of VMs that were used before Docker  Dealing with several gigabytes big images  moving those big images around  just to change some fields in the application  was very very laborious  Understandable     With a Docker ecosystem  you will never need to move around gigabytes on  small changes   thanks aufs and Registry  and you don t need to worry about losing performance by packaging applications into a Docker container at runtime  You don t need to worry about versions of that image   And finally you will even often be able to reproduce complex production environments even on your Linux laptop  don t call me if doesn t work in your case      And of course you can start Docker containers in VMs  it s a good idea   Reduce your server provisioning on the VM level  All the above could be managed by Docker   P S  Meanwhile Docker uses its own implementation  libcontainer  instead of LXC  But LXC is still usable

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They both are very different  Docker is lightweight and uses LXC libcontainer  which relies on kernel namespacing and cgroups  and does not have machine hardware emulation such as hypervisor  KVM  Xen which are heavy   Docker and LXC is meant more for sandboxing  containerization  and resource isolation  It uses the host OS s  currently only Linux kernel  clone API which provides namespacing for IPC  NS  mount   network  PID  UTS  etc   What about memory  I O  CPU  etc   That is controlled using cgroups where you can create groups with certain resource  CPU  memory  etc   specification restriction and put your processes in there  On top of LXC  Docker provides a storage backend  http   www projectatomic io docs filesystems   e g   union mount filesystem where you can add layers and share layers between different mount namespaces   This is a powerful feature where the base images are typically readonly and only when the container modifies something in the layer will it write something to read-write partition  a k a  copy on write   It also provides many other wrappers such as registry and versioning of images   With normal LXC you need to come with some rootfs or share the rootfs and when shared  and the changes are reflected on other containers  Due to lot of these added features  Docker is more popular than LXC  LXC is popular in embedded environments for implementing security around processes exposed to external entities such as network and UI  Docker is popular in cloud multi-tenancy environment where consistent production environment is expected   A normal VM  for example  VirtualBox and VMware  uses a hypervisor  and related technologies either have dedicated firmware that becomes the first layer for the first OS  host OS  or guest OS 0  or a software that runs on the host OS to provide hardware emulation such as CPU  USB accessories  memory  network  etc   to the guest OSes  VMs are still  as of 2015  popular in high security multi-tenant environment   Docker LXC can almost be run on any cheap hardware  less than 1 nbsp GB of memory is also OK as long as you have newer kernel  vs  normal VMs need at least 2 nbsp GB of memory  etc   to do anything meaningful with it  But Docker support on the host OS is not available in OS such as Windows  as of Nov 2014  where as may types of VMs can be run on windows  Linux  and Macs   Here is a pic from docker rightscale

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Most of the answers here talk about virtual machines  I m going to give you a one-liner response to this question that has helped me the most over the last couple years of using Docker  It s this      Docker is just a fancy way to run a process  not a virtual machine    Now  let me explain a bit more about what that means  Virtual machines are their own beast  I feel like explaining what Docker is will help you understand this more than explaining what a virtual machine is  Especially because there are many fine answers here telling you exactly what someone means when they say  virtual machine   So     A Docker container is just a process  and its children  that is compartmentalized using cgroups inside the host system s kernel from the rest of the processes  You can actually see your Docker container processes by running ps aux on the host  For example  starting apache2  in a container  is just starting apache2 as a special process on the host  It s just been compartmentalized from other processes on the machine  It is important to note that your containers do not exist outside of your containerized process  lifetime  When your process dies  your container dies  That s because Docker replaces pid 1 inside your container with your application  pid 1 is normally the init system   This last point about pid 1 is very important   As far as the filesystem used by each of those container processes  Docker uses UnionFS-backed images  which is what you re downloading when you do a docker pull ubuntu  Each  image  is just a series of layers and related metadata  The concept of layering is very important here  Each layer is just a change from the layer underneath it  For example  when you delete a file in your Dockerfile while building a Docker container  you re actually just creating a layer on top of the last layer which says  this file has been deleted   Incidentally  this is why you can delete a big file from your filesystem  but the image still takes up the same amount of disk space  The file is still there  in the layers underneath the current one  Layers themselves are just tarballs of files  You can test this out with docker save --output  tmp ubuntu tar ubuntu and then cd  tmp  amp  amp  tar xvf ubuntu tar  Then you can take a look around  All those directories that look like long hashes are actually the individual layers  Each one contains files  layer tar  and metadata  json  with information about that particular layer  Those layers just describe changes to the filesystem which are saved as a layer  on top of  its original state  When reading the  current  data  the filesystem reads data as though it were looking only at the top-most layers of changes  That s why the file appears to be deleted  even though it still exists in  previous  layers  because the filesystem is only looking at the top-most layers  This allows completely different containers to share their filesystem layers  even though some significant changes may have happened to the filesystem on the top-most layers in each container  This can save you a ton of disk space  when your containers share their base image layers  However  when you mount directories and files from the host system into your container by way of volumes  those volumes  bypass  the UnionFS  so changes are not stored in layers   Networking in Docker is achieved by using an ethernet bridge  called docker0 on the host   and virtual interfaces for every container on the host  It creates a virtual subnet in docker0 for your containers to communicate  between  one another  There are many options for networking here  including creating custom subnets for your containers  and the ability to  share  your host s networking stack for your container to access directly   Docker is moving very fast  Its documentation is some of the best documentation I ve ever seen  It is generally well-written  concise  and accurate  I recommend you check the documentation available for more information  and trust the documentation over anything else you read online  including Stack Overflow  If you have specific questions  I highly recommend joining  docker on Freenode IRC and asking there  you can even use Freenode s webchat for that

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Through this post we are going to draw some lines of differences between VMs and LXCs  Let s first define them   VM   A virtual machine emulates a physical computing environment  but requests for CPU  memory  hard disk  network and other hardware resources are managed by a virtualization layer which translates these requests to the underlying physical hardware   In this context the VM is called as the Guest while the environment it runs on is called the host   LXCs   Linux Containers  LXC  are operating system-level capabilities that make it possible to run multiple isolated Linux containers  on one control host  the LXC host   Linux Containers serve as a lightweight alternative to VMs as they don   t require the hypervisors viz  Virtualbox  KVM  Xen  etc   Now unless you were drugged by Alan  Zach Galifianakis- from the Hangover series  and have been in Vegas for the last year  you will be pretty aware about the tremendous spurt of interest for Linux containers technology  and if I will be specific one container project which has created a buzz around the world in last few months is     Docker leading to some echoing opinions that cloud computing environments should abandon virtual machines  VMs  and replace them with containers due to their lower overhead and potentially better performance   But the big question is  is it feasible   will it be sensible   a  LXCs are scoped to an instance of Linux  It might be different flavors of Linux  e g  a Ubuntu container on a CentOS host but it   s still Linux   Similarly  Windows-based containers are scoped to an instance of Windows now if we look at VMs they have a pretty broader scope and using the hypervisors you are not limited to operating systems Linux or Windows   b  LXCs have low overheads and have better performance as compared to VMs  Tools viz  Docker which are built on the shoulders of LXC technology have provided developers with a platform to run their applications and at the same time have empowered operations people with a tool that will allow them to deploy the same container on production servers or data centers  It tries to make the experience between a developer running an application  booting and testing an application and an operations person deploying that application seamless  because this is where all the friction lies in and purpose of DevOps is to break down those silos   So the best approach is the cloud infrastructure providers should advocate an appropriate use of the VMs and LXC  as they are each suited to handle specific workloads and scenarios   Abandoning VMs is not practical as of now  So both VMs and LXCs have their own individual existence and importance

[docker] How is Docker different from a virtual machine?

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