Docker is an open source, revolutionary software project that allows application developers and system administrators to easily and quickly package, distribute and run applications as a lightweight container, anywhere.
It’s a command-line application comprised of two components, the Docker Hub that has been designed from the ground up to act as a cloud service for sharing apps and automate workflows, and the Docker Engine, which is the actual server process designed to manage all the containers.
Automates the deployment and packaging of apps
The software can be used to automate the deployment and packaging of applications, create private and lightweight PAAS (Platform As a Service) environments, automate testing, as well as continuous deployment and integration, and to scale and deploy web applications, backend services and databases.
The Linux container engine
Dubbed by its developers “the Linux container engine,” Docker can be used by sysadmins and developers as an open platform for distributed applications, allowing them to build, ship and run any distributed apps.
Supported operating systems
At the moment, Docker runs only on GNU/Linux operating systems. It has been successfully tested with numerous distributions of Linux, including Debian, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Fedora, openSUSE, as well as CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Under the hood and availability
The software is written entirely in the Go programming language developed at Google. It is distributed as a single, universal sources archive that can be optimized and deployed on virtually any Linux kernel-based operating system, supporting both 32-bit and 64-bit hardware platforms.
