They allow you to isolate services, but there are a few major differences that make virtual machines much less efficient.įor starters, you need to have an entire guest operating system for each application you want to isolate. You may have used Vagrant, VirtualBox, or VMWare to run a virtual machine. What Makes Docker Different from a Virtual Machine The Docker image contains the code, runtime, system libraries and anything else you would install on a server to make it run if you weren’t using Docker. This unit is typically labeled as a Docker image.Įverything the application needs to run is included. TomFern / dockerizing-ruby What is Docker?ĭocker allows you to package up an application or service with all of its dependencies into a standardized unit.
