Containers Not Just For Docker

Over the past year (or more really) containers has been a big thing and specifically Docker, and I suspect so much so that many people believe that docker and container are synonymous. This is far from the truth. Docker is really a nice wrapper that uses containers (or should that be name-spaces?) to provide a method of distributing and deploying a single application. Containers are really just a name-space in Linux which lets you control some of the resources within that name-space. It also can do fun things like renumbering your PIDs inside the name space starting from 1 again. If you look at the process list on the host though, you will see that all the name-spaced (containerised) processes all have PIDs with the default (root?) name-space. As many others have alluded to, it’s also not easy to see what name-space a particular process belongs to. Hopefully this will be fixed, but I digress. Read more