At Knowledge In Practice we were pretty early adopters of Docker, and after more than six months of use nearly all of our production services are now deployed to Amazon’s EC2 as linux containers. While the lower overhead of containers was a draw,  as a small team the main benefits for us have been ease of deployment and increased environmental stability due to the use of Docker build files to declaratively specify the content of each service’s run-time environment. Launching a new instance of a service is literally as easy as adding one line to the cloudinit script for the instance, then running “docker pull” to get the image we want, and “docker run” to get the container going. Those steps could easily be automated as well. It’s a workflow that’s hard to beat.

Late last month IBM Research released a paper (PDF) comparing the performance of linux containers vs. traditional types of hardware and software virtualization. Not surprisingly containers fare quite well, although the paper notes that both VMs and containers need to be fine-tuned for high I/O workloads. Section 2.3 of the paper provides an excellent quick overview of how containers are implemented in linux using kernel namespaces and cgroups, and in fact I found that part of the document more valuable than the performance comparisons. Well worth a scan, at least, if you have an interest in this technology.