Docker 101: What Is Docker and How Does It Work?

What if your 20-year-old family van transformed into a Ferrari when you put new oil in it? Sounds impossible, right? In the case of your 20 year old van it is – but Docker does just that for the delivery of your applications. If your servers are your 20 year old van, Docker is the new oil that transforms them into a Ferrari.

How Does Docker Work?

Docker is a container based technology that helps you deploy multiple applications at the same time – at an amazingly high speed. Containers allow developers to accumulate all the libraries or other dependencies it needs to run an application and deploy it as one package. So, Docker actually does the job of your virtual machine, but does it in a much more effective and productive way.

From a performance point of view, a virtual machine creates an entire operating system which has an effect on both the time to deploy and process your applications. Docker allows applications to use the same Linux kernel system that they are currently running. Docker’s approach reduces the size of the application by a significant margin, which in turn results in the vast performance improvement.

What Programming Language Does Docker Use?

Docker is written in the Google Go (golang) programming language. To learn why Go was used, we’ll refer you directly to Google.

Is Docker Useful to Non-Developers?

Docker’s programming language can be used both by developers and the people who look into the operations aspect of any system. Thus, Docker falls into the DevOps section that has recently gained huge traction for its multipurpose utility. From a developer’s standpoint, Docker gives assurances to worry about only their own code, and not about the system performance. For those tasked with looking after the operations phase, the high performance reduces the system overhead and also the number of systems required at a given point of time.

Why is Docker Becoming So Popular So Quickly?

Prior to Docker, containers were seen as complex entities that needed a lot of tuning and nurturing before they could be of any real use. When Docker 1.0 was released, the definition and perception of containers was turned upside down. Everyone knew that with containers an amazing level of performance could be achieved, but the efforts to reach that optimized level was time intensive and expensive. With the mass shift to cloud computing in the past couple years, languages such as Docker that perform exceptionally well on the cloud have received a major boost in usage.