Docker is an application platform. It’s a new way of running applications in isolated, lightweight units called containers. Containers are a very efficient way of running apps – much more efficient than virtual machines (VMs) or bare-metal servers. Docker is completely agnostic to the type of apps it can run Containers are isolated units, but they can integrate with other components. Your WebForms container can access a REST API hosted in your .NET Core container. Your .NET Core container can access a SQL Server database running in a container, or a SQL Server instance running on a separate machine. You can even set up a cluster with a mixture of Linux and Windows machines all running Docker, and have Windows containers transparently communicate with Linux containers.
Companies big and small are moving to Docker to take advantage of this flexibility and efficiency. you can reduce your hardware requirements by 50% by moving to Docker and reduce time to release by 90% while still maintaining your applications’ high availability.
This significant reduction applies equally to on-premises data centers and to the cloud.
Efficiency isn’t the only gain. When you package your application to run in Docker, you get portability. You can run your app in a Docker container on your laptop and it will behave in exactly the same way on a server in your data center and on a VM in any cloud. This means your deployment process is simple and risk-free, because you’re deploying the exact same artifacts that you’ve tested, and you’re also free to choose between hardware vendors and cloud providers.
