Tutorial

What is Docker?

Published on February 25, 2021

Developer Advocate

What is Docker?

Docker is a popular open source containerization tool used to provide a portable and consistent runtime environment for software applications, while consuming less resources than a traditional server or virtual machine. Docker uses containers, isolated user-space environments that run at the operating system level and share system resources such as the kernel and the filesystem.

While other container systems exist, Docker became popular for providing a more accessible and comprehensive interface around the technology, and for creating a public repository of base container images that users can build upon when creating containerized environments to run their applications.

To learn more about Docker, you can refer to the following resources:

Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.

Learn more about our products

About the authors
Default avatar

Developer Advocate

Dev/Ops passionate about open source, PHP, and Linux.

Still looking for an answer?

Ask a questionSearch for more help

Was this helpful?
 
Leave a comment


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Join the Tech Talk
Success! Thank you! Please check your email for further details.

Please complete your information!

Featured on Community

Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

Become a contributor

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more
DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel