Docker is a process manager with superpowers

It encapsulates heterogeneous payloads in Standard Containers, and runs them on any server with strong guarantees of isolation and repeatability.

Is is a great building block for automating distributed systems: large-scale web deployments, database clusters, continuous deployment systems, private PaaS, service-oriented architectures, etc.

• Heterogeneous payloads: any combination of binaries, libraries, configuration files, scripts, virtualenvs, jars, gems, tarballs, you name it. No more juggling between domain-specific tools. Docker can deploy and run them all.

• Any server: docker can run on any x64 machine with a modern linux kernel - whether it's a laptop, a bare metal server or a VM. This makes it perfect for multi-cloud deployments.

• Isolation: docker isolates processes from each other and from the underlying host, using lightweight containers.

• Repeatability: because containers are isolated in their own filesystem, they behave the same regardless of where, when, and alongside what they run.

Notable features

• Filesystem isolation: each process container runs in a completely separate root filesystem.

• Resource isolation: system resources like cpu and memory can be allocated differently to each process container, using cgroups.

• Network isolation: each process container runs in its own network namespace, with a virtual interface and IP address of its own.

• Copy-on-write: root filesystems are created using copy-on-write, which makes deployment extremeley fast, memory-cheap and disk-cheap.

• Logging: the standard streams (stdout/stderr/stdin) of each process container is collected and logged for real-time or batch retrieval.

• Change management: changes to a container's filesystem can be committed into a new image and re-used to create more containers. No templating or manual configuration required.

• Interactive shell: docker can allocate a pseudo-tty and attach to the standard input of any container, for example to run a throaway interactive shell.

Under the hood

Under the hood, Docker is built on the following components:

• The cgroup and namespacing capabilities of the Linux kernel;

• AUFS, a powerful union filesystem with copy-on-write capabilities;

• The Go programming language;

• lxc, a set of convenience scripts to simplify the creation of linux containers.

Setup instructions

Requirements

Right now, the officially supported distributions are:

• Ubuntu 12.04 (precise LTS)
• Ubuntu 12.10 (quantal)

Docker probably works on other distributions featuring a recent kernel, the AUFS patch, and up-to-date lxc. However this has not been tested.

Installation

1. Set up your host of choice on a physical / virtual machine

2. Assume root identity on your newly installed environment (sudo -s)

3. Type the following commands:

    apt-get update
    apt-get install lxc wget bsdtar curl
   

4. Download the latest docker binaries: wget http://docker.io.s3.amazonaws.com/builds/$(uname -s)/$(uname -m)/docker-master.tgz (Or get the Linux/x86_64 binaries here )

5. Extract the contents of the tar file tar -xf docker-master.tar.gz

6. Launch the docker daemon in the background ./dockerd &

7. Download a base image ./docker pull base

8. Run your first container! ./docker run -i -a -t base /bin/bash

9. Start exploring ./docker --help

Consider adding docker and dockerd to your PATH for simplicity.

What is a Standard Container?

Docker defines a unit of software delivery called a Standard Container. The goal of a Standard Container is to encapsulate a software component and all its dependencies in a format that is self-describing and portable, so that any compliant runtime can run it without extra dependency, regardless of the underlying machine and the contents of the container.

The spec for Standard Containers is currently work in progress, but it is very straightforward. It mostly defines 1) an image format, 2) a set of standard operations, and 3) an execution environment.

A great analogy for this is the shipping container. Just like Standard Containers are a fundamental unit of software delivery, shipping containers (http://bricks.argz.com/ins/7823-1/12) are a fundamental unit of physical delivery.

1. STANDARD OPERATIONS

Just like shipping containers, Standard Containers define a set of STANDARD OPERATIONS. Shipping containers can be lifted, stacked, locked, loaded, unloaded and labelled. Similarly, standard containers can be started, stopped, copied, snapshotted, downloaded, uploaded and tagged.

2. CONTENT-AGNOSTIC

Just like shipping containers, Standard Containers are CONTENT-AGNOSTIC: all standard operations have the same effect regardless of the contents. A shipping container will be stacked in exactly the same way whether it contains Vietnamese powder coffe or spare Maserati parts. Similarly, Standard Containers are started or uploaded in the same way whether they contain a postgres database, a php application with its dependencies and application server, or Java build artifacts.

3. INFRASTRUCTURE-AGNOSTIC

Both types of containers are INFRASTRUCTURE-AGNOSTIC: they can be transported to thousands of facilities around the world, and manipulated by a wide variety of equipment. A shipping container can be packed in a factory in Ukraine, transported by truck to the nearest routing center, stacked onto a train, loaded into a German boat by an Australian-built crane, stored in a warehouse at a US facility, etc. Similarly, a standard container can be bundled on my laptop, uploaded to S3, downloaded, run and snapshotted by a build server at Equinix in Virginia, uploaded to 10 staging servers in a home-made Openstack cluster, then sent to 30 production instances across 3 EC2 regions.

4. DESIGNED FOR AUTOMATION

Because they offer the same standard operations regardless of content and infrastructure, Standard Containers, just like their physical counterpart, are extremely well-suited for automation. In fact, you could say automation is their secret weapon.

Many things that once required time-consuming and error-prone human effort can now be programmed. Before shipping containers, a bag of powder coffee was hauled, dragged, dropped, rolled and stacked by 10 different people in 10 different locations by the time it reached its destination. 1 out of 50 disappeared. 1 out of 20 was damaged. The process was slow, inefficient and cost a fortune - and was entirely different depending on the facility and the type of goods.

Similarly, before Standard Containers, by the time a software component ran in production, it had been individually built, configured, bundled, documented, patched, vendored, templated, tweaked and instrumented by 10 different people on 10 different computers. Builds failed, libraries conflicted, mirrors crashed, post-it notes were lost, logs were misplaced, cluster updates were half-broken. The process was slow, inefficient and cost a fortune - and was entirely different depending on the language and infrastructure provider.

5. INDUSTRIAL-GRADE DELIVERY

There are 17 million shipping containers in existence, packed with every physical good imaginable. Every single one of them can be loaded on the same boats, by the same cranes, in the same facilities, and sent anywhere in the World with incredible efficiency. It is embarrassing to think that a 30 ton shipment of coffee can safely travel half-way across the World in less time than it takes a software team to deliver its code from one datacenter to another sitting 10 miles away.

With Standard Containers we can put an end to that embarrassment, by making INDUSTRIAL-GRADE DELIVERY of software a reality.

Standard Container Specification

(TODO)

Image format

Standard operations

• Copy
• Run
• Stop
• Wait
• Commit
• Attach standard streams
• List filesystem changes
• ...

Execution environment

Root filesystem

Environment variables

Process arguments

Networking

Process namespacing

Resource limits

Process monitoring

Logging

Signals

Pseudo-terminal allocation

Security