The Docker driver is a hypervisor driver for Openstack Nova Compute. It was introduced with the Havana release, but lives out-of-tree for Icehouse and Juno. Being out-of-tree has allowed the driver to reach maturity and feature-parity faster than would be possible should it have remained in-tree. It is expected the driver will return to mainline Nova in the Kilo release.
Docker is an open-source engine which automates the deployment of applications as highly portable, self-sufficient containers which are independent of hardware, language, framework, packaging system and hosting provider.
Docker provides management of Linux containers with a high level API providing a lightweight solution that runs processes in isolation. It provides a way to automate software deployment in a secure and repeatable environment. A Docker container includes a software component along with all of its dependencies - binaries, libraries, configuration files, scripts, virtualenvs, jars, gems, tarballs, etc. Docker can be run on any x64 Linux kernel supporting cgroups and aufs.
Docker is a way of managing multiple containers on a single machine. However used behind Nova makes it much more powerful since it’s then possible to manage several hosts, which in turn manage hundreds of containers. The current Docker project aims for full OpenStack compatibility.
Containers don't aim to be a replacement for VMs, they are complementary in the sense that they are better for specific use cases.
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