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 referred to as cloud-native improvement. Docker’s airtight utility setting 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) methods. After all, it additionally ushered within the period of cloud-native utility structure, which has skilled mass adoption and has grow to be the default cloud structure.
The container format was the appropriate tech on the proper time—bringing a lot agility to builders. Digital machines by comparability seemed 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 potential for builders to easily seize their very own infrastructure with out going via a centralized IT mannequin.
The virtues of digital machines
When containers had been first launched to the plenty, 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. At present, when most individuals hear the time period “virtualization,” they robotically consider heavyweight stacks with startup latency, non-portability, and useful resource inefficiency. When you consider a container as a small laptop computer, a digital machine is sort of a 1,000 pound server.
