Container

A container is a lightweight, self-contained package that bundles an application together with everything it needs to run: its code, libraries and dependencies. Because it carries all of that inside, it behaves the same on the developer’s laptop, on a test server ✕ A server is a powerful computer that provides data or services to other devices — for example serving a website or storing your cloud files. More in the glossary → or in the cloud ✕ "The cloud" refers to services and storage that run not on your device but on external servers on the internet. You can access them from anywhere. More in the glossary → , without the classic "but it worked on my machine" problem. It runs isolated from the rest ✕ A REST API is the most common style for building web APIs: it uses web addresses (URLs) and standard HTTP methods to request and send data, usually in JSON format. More in the glossary → of the system, but, unlike a virtual machine, it shares the host operating system’s kernel, so it is far lighter and starts in seconds. That makes it easy to move and scale applications. The best-known tool for building and running them is Docker ✕ Docker is the most popular platform for building and running containers. It made the technology mainstream and makes it easy to package an app and move it, unchanged, to any environment. More in the glossary → , and to manage many at once you use Kubernetes ✕ Kubernetes is an open-source system that manages and orchestrates containers at scale: it automates their deployment, load distribution and recovery from failures across many servers. More in the glossary → . Containers are a central piece of modern development and deployment.