A brief overview of containers

Over the past three years, containers have grown in popularity like wildfire. You would be hard-pressed to attend an IT conference without finding popular sessions on Docker or containers in general.

Docker lies at the heart of the mass adoption and the excitement in the container space. As Malcom McLean revolutionized the physical shipping world in the 1950s by creating a standardized shipping container, which is used today for everything from ice cube trays to automobiles (you can refer to more details about this in point 1 in the References section at the end of the chapter), Linux containers are revolutionizing the software development world by making application environments portable and consistent across the infrastructure landscape. As an organization, Docker has taken the existing container technology to a new level by making it easy to implement and replicate across environments and providers.