My Wife Asked Me To Explain Containers

Learn how containerisation technology works and how it differs from Virtual Machines for the next time it comes up at the dinner table

Some of my family members and friends tuned in to watch my virtual talk at DockerCon 2020 and I was highly appreciative of it. The discussion I had with most of them afterwards, however, wasn’t about how I over simplified certain concepts or conveyed a wrong idea of something specific in my talk. For the most part they had absolutely no idea what I was talking about, but did walk away with at least one word they clung to, ‘containers’.

I must say, I certainly enjoyed trying to breakdown the concept of containerisation and Docker to each of them. I personally agree with the idea that the test of your understanding of something is often (not always) revealed in how well you can put it in layman’s terms for others. Explaining containerisation to my wife topped them all, and just so it’s clear, she’s a lot smarter than I am.

I have written a post on Wrapping Your Head Around Docker, but thought I would dedicate a new post specifically talking about containerisation and how virtualisation works in relation to containers, whilst contrasting them with Virtual Machines (VMs) because of the common misconceptions…