What’s the matter with Docker?

Docker.

If you work in IT or have a friend who works there, you probably have heard about Docker, Docker here, Docker there, every day more developers join to Docker’s community and start the process of making their development much simpler using this powerful tool, but, what does Docker is? and what’s the matter with Docker that everybody started using it everywhere? here, I will answer to all those questions about Docker, but first, let’s see some history.

The name of Docker comes from a Dock, situated within the industrial revolution where the variety of products were plenty wide and there was no standard for importing and exporting products, there were cases where the Dock had not the correct machines to unload certain type of products.

Industrial revolution Dock.

In the sight of this an impor-export standard for international commerce was introduced and quickly embraced by everybody, yes you guessed it’s the container.

Traditional Container.

Now there was an standard on weigh and volume of what could be commerced, this helped on the dock’s and ship’s organization and also the standardization of the machinery needed to upload/unload the products.

This is the idea behind Docker, nowadays we all have a different development context which could vary from a sdk version, to the runtime version we use to run out files.

Here is where Docker comes in action, it allows you to pack everything you need to run your application in a comfortable container you can use across different machines with your same OS (having Docker installed).

So if you have Java 8 in your development context because you need something that’s only available for Java 8, but you need to share your app with another developer which have Java 5 in his computer because he needs a feature only available in Java 5, here you have 2 options:

1. Starting using Java 5 in order to be able to share your app with your colleague (and find a way to re factorize your code).
2. Ask your colleague to install Java 8 to be able to run your app (and crash his entire app by the way).

But now with Docker you are able to pack everything you need for your app (Java 8 + Your app in this case) to run, in a container which will allow your colleague to run it smoothly without making any changes on his context.

This is in short words how Docker works and what does it do, it simplifies the way we deploy our apps and run them in different context.

Now is your turn to start making some amazing apps not worrying about which library or Java version or SDKs you have, It will work everywhere Docker is installed!.