Docker Under the Hood
· 6 min read
First things first: Docker is not a virtual machine. It provides similar isolation benefits, but without virtualizing an entire operating system the way a VM does. This is a common misconception worth clearing up before we go any further.
So what is Docker, exactly? At its core, it's a process running on your Linux system — one that has been isolated from the rest of the machine in a way that makes it feel entirely self-contained. Instead of emulating a full kernel like a VM does, Docker isolates a single process using primitives built directly into the Linux kernel. Let's dig into how that actually works.
