standard called Rocket, and many standards and products are being built
around these technologies.
Don’t let containers scare you. This kind of approach is nothing new—contain-
ers have been used for years as an approach to componentize whole systems,
abstracting them from the physical platform, allowing you to move them
around from platform to platform (or cloud to cloud).
Let’s focus on Docker for now. The Linux kernel, which is in the container,
allows for resource isolation (CPU, memory, I/O, network, and so on) and
doesn’t require starting any virtual machines. Docker extends a common con-
tainer format called Linux Containers (LXC), with a high-level API that provides
a lightweight virtualization solution that runs processes in isolation. Docker
also provides namespaces to completely isolate an application’s view of the
operating environment, including process trees, network, user IDs, and file
systems.
The use of this technology is rather exciting, considering it solves an obvious
and expansive problem: How to p