It's known that containers, and specifically Linux containers, are not new. Tech giants such as Oracle, HP and IBM have been using containers for decades. In recent years, though, the open source project Docker has gained popularity as an alternative, or complement to virtualization.
One of the major benefits of containers is portability. Containers can run on top of virtual machines, or bare metal servers. They can run on-premises or in the cloud. This has made one of the earliest popular use cases of containers be around software development. Coders can write applications, place it in a container, and then the application can be moved across various environments, as it is encapsulated inside the container.
