Containerization

Consolidate hardware resources to derive maximum utilization. As light, portable, and self-sufficient software, they standardize configuration and dependencies while facilitating application portability.Dubbed as “lightweight virtualization”, Docker encapsulates your software and its dependencies into a single isolated container, making it easier to deploy several distributed applications at once across machines of different configurations. In short, you code once and deploy many times over.

Cloud Infrastructure Services

Immutable Infrastructure

Predictability, version control, and faster rollbacks are some of the perks of immutability. Also Isolation of applications prevents you from spending precious time fixing broken servers than replacing them.

Performance

Docker consumes less hardware resources than virtual machines because of the absence of hypervisor. It is easier and faster to spun Docker images and run multiple containers on the same host.

Platform Agnostic

Docker leans on the principle of absent infrastructure dependencies. The layered container works across various operating systems, QA servers, and production data centers with one-time configuration.

Security

Docker inherits default Linux containers features such as namespaces, cgroups, and restricted Linux kernel capabilities. Docker host can also be hardened through GRSEC, PAX, and SELinux module.

Cloud Administration and Maintenance

Managing both UNIX and Windows services (Web services, mail services, etc.), creating custom server templates, as well as providing technical support for back-ups, reports, alerts, data storage management.

Version Tracking

Add new versions, rollback to previous ones, track successive versions, and check difference between versions. Docker also records who and how a container is assembled, leading to full traceability.

Resource Utilization

Use many more containers on a single host system than hosting virtual machines (VMs). Docker shares the kernel of the host system with other containers while not imitating the host system OS.

Reusable Components

Docker consolidates common components as ‘base images’, which can be reused for future applications. More specialized images can be built/stacked manually or through automated build above the base image.