However for many of the market, containers formally hit the radar in 2013 with the introduction of Docker, and began mainstreaming with Docker 1.0 in 2015. The widespread adoption of Docker within the 2010’s was a revolution for builders and set the stage for what’s now known as cloud-native improvement. Docker’s airtight utility surroundings solved the longstanding trade meme of “it really works on my machine” and changed heavy and mutable improvement instruments like Vagrant with the immutable patterns of Dockerfiles and container pictures. This shift enabled a brand new renaissance in utility improvement, deployment, and steady integration (CI) programs. In fact, it additionally ushered within the period of cloud-native utility structure, which has skilled mass adoption and has turn into the default cloud structure.
The container format was the best tech on the proper time—bringing a lot agility to builders. Digital machines by comparability regarded costly, heavyweight, cumbersome to work with, and—most damning—had been considered one thing you needed to wait on “IT” to provision, at a time when the general public clouds made it doable for builders to easily seize their very own infrastructure with out going by way of a centralized IT mannequin.
The virtues of digital machines
When containers had been first launched to the lots, most digital machines had been packaged up as home equipment. The consumption mannequin was typically heavyweight VMware stacks, requiring devoted VM hosts. Licensing on that mannequin was (and nonetheless is) very costly. Immediately, when most individuals hear the time period “virtualization,” they mechanically consider heavyweight stacks with startup latency, non-portability, and useful resource inefficiency. In the event you consider a container as a small laptop computer, a digital machine is sort of a 1,000 pound server.
