What is Docker?
Docker is an open platform for developing, shipping and running applications. It packages an application and what it needs into a container, a lightweight, loosely isolated environment. The same container can run on a laptop, in a data centre or in the cloud.
Docker's documentation says containers hold everything an application needs to run, which makes them portable between systems, and several can run on one machine at the same time. A container is created from an image, a read-only template built from layered instructions in a file called a Dockerfile.
The Docker client talks to a background service, the Docker daemon, which manages images, containers, networks and volumes.
Background from ai notis, not part of the news. Checked against its sources on 4 Oct 2026.
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- What is Docker? · Docker