How is Docker different from a virtual machine?

Question

I keep rereading the Docker documentation to try to understand the difference between Docker and a full VM. How does it manage to provide a full filesystem, isolated network

Answer 1

With a virtual machine, we have a server, we have a host operating system on that server, and then we have a hypervisor. And then running on top of that hypervisor, we have any number of guest operating systems with an application and its dependent binaries, and libraries on that server. It brings a whole guest operating system with it. It's quite heavyweight. Also there's a limit to how much you can actually put on each physical machine.

Docker containers on the other hand, are slightly different. We have the server. We have the host operating system. But instead a hypervisor, we have the Docker engine, in this case. In this case, we're not bringing a whole guest operating system with us. We're bringing a very thin layer of the operating system, and the container can talk down into the host OS in order to get to the kernel functionality there. And that allows us to have a very lightweight container.

All it has in there is the application code and any binaries and libraries that it requires. And those binaries and libraries can actually be shared across different containers if you want them to be as well. And what this enables us to do, is a number of things. They have much faster startup time. You can't stand up a single VM in a few seconds like that. And equally, taking them down as quickly.. so we can scale up and down very quickly and we'll look at that later on.

Every container thinks that it’s running on its own copy of the operating system. It’s got its own file system, own registry, etc. which is a kind of a lie. It’s actually being virtualized.