Introducing Docker

Docker is a popular platform for developing, packaging, and deploying applications in containers. Before Docker’s invention, software developers had to deal with the problem of software dependencies, which meant that the software would work well on one computer but fail to work on another system.

Software developers would create programs on their computers, but when they tried to share them with other people, things often went wrong. Programs that worked perfectly on one computer might not have worked on another because of differences in the operating system, software versions, configuration files, or other system-related factors.

To solve this problem, a group of developers in 2013 released a tool called Docker. Docker lets developers package programs and all the necessary dependencies into something called a Docker image. A Docker image is a read-only template that contains the instructions for creating a Docker container. A Docker image includes the...