How Docker is different from a virtual machine

Question

Hi Guys,

I am new to container technology. I am trying to learn the architecture of Docker. But I am not able to understand how Docker is different from a virtual machine?

Answer 1

Hi@akhtar,

Docker is container-based technology and containers are just user space of the operating system. At the low level, a container is just a set of processes that are isolated from the rest of the system, running from a distinct image that provides all files necessary to support the processes. It is built for running applications. In Docker, the containers running share the host OS kernel.

A Virtual Machine, on the other hand, is not based on container technology. They are made up of user space plus kernel space of an operating system. Under VMs, the server hardware is virtualized. Each VM has an Operating system (OS) & apps. It shares hardware resources from the host.