

If the first half of the first decade of the 21st Century has been about virtualization, the next half-decade may be dominated by a new approach, the anti-virtualization tool called Docker.
Docker, to paraphrase the old Suave shampoo commercial, “does what theirs does for a lot less.” In this case, “theirs” is the hypervisor-based virtual machine. And “a lot less” refers to overhead demands and performance hits, both heavily in Docker’s favor.
Applications developed in Docker containers can run on anything from a laptop, to a virtual machine to the cloud with no changes. That separation of infrastructure from applications, plus its open source value proposition and comparative ease-of-use and deployment make Docket the easy choice for building, shipping and running distributed applications.
Docker gives users the ability to run multiple containerized applications simultaneously on a single piece of hardware, running a single instance of an operating system. It runs multiple applications on a single machine, rather than creating multiple virtual machines (each with its own OS installation, anti-malware, etc.) on a single hardware platform.
The downside, at least for now, is that virtualization is a mature and established technology with lots of supporters. Docker is new and not yet established, but that is rapidly changing as Docker, too, has lots of supporters.
Depending on how old you are, Docker either harkens back to VMS, makes good on some of the failed promise of PC multitasking or is a potential VMware killer. Docker is as exciting a development tool as anything that has happened since the introduction of Java.
I’d like to hear your thoughts about Docker — what you like, don’t like and what the future holds. Feel free to drop me a line.
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