Docker is a great tool for building, shipping, and running your applications. Many companies are already moving their legacy applications to Docker containers and now with the introduction of the Microsoft Windows Server 2016, Docker Engine can now run containers natively on Windows.To make it even easier, there’s a new prototyping tool for Windows VMs that shows you how to replicate a VM Image to a container. Docker Captain Trevor Sullivan recently released the Image2Docker tool, an open source project we’re hosting on GitHub. Still in it’s early stages, Image2Docker is a Powershell module that you can point at a virtual…
Recently I was giving a talk at a trade show on the basics of Docker, and how an application goes from an idea to being a production workload running on a Universal Control Plane managed Swarm cluster. As part of that talk, I spent a bit of time talking about how containers are not VMs. This was especially relevant as most of the attendees currently worked as virtualization sysadmins. During the QA portion of the session one of the attendees asked me “When does my application go in a VM and when does it go in a container?”
A couple weeks back I talked about how Docker containers were not virtual machines (VMs). I received a lot of positive feedback on the article (thanks!), but I also heard a common question: Can VMs and Docker containers coexist? The answer is a resounding “yes.”
I spend a good portion of my time at Docker talking to community members with varying degrees of familiarity with Docker and I sense a common theme: people’s natural response when first working with Docker is to try and frame it in terms of virtual machines. I can’t count the number of times I have heard Docker containers described as “lightweight VMs”. I get it because I did the exact same thing when I first started working with Docker. It’s easy to connect those dots as both technologies share some characteristics. Both are designed to provide an isolated environment in which…