Streaming Docker Containers to your Browser

Docker 🐳 is a widely adopted platform to package, share and spin up applications effortlessly, in a reproducible manner, abstracting away from the underlying OS, and with an excellent degree of isolation of the resulting ephemeral containers. It’s so popular that it shouldn’t really need an introduction!

Docker containers are extremely versatile and one of their least-known (but definitely not least cool!) usages that have come to light over the last few years comes down to streaming GUI applications — or even whole operative systems — over the browser. 🤯

Why would I do that?

That’s a fair question. Let’s check out some of the advantages that come from streaming Docker containers over the wire:

• 🕵️‍♂️increased privacy: just imagine browsing the web via a Dockerised Tor Browser instance hosted in the cloud and streamed over the wire. 😅
• 🔐security and isolation at your fingertips: spin up and access anything from simple GUI applications to full-fledged operative systems through your browser without the need for any additional software and in full isolation, even a docker container escape would at most compromise your server but not your client machines.
• 🔄sharing interactive sessions: colleagues, friends, students could go over…