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First draft of new README. Feedback and contributions welcome!

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Docker: the Linux container runtime
===================================
Docker: the Linux container engine
==================================
Docker complements LXC with a high-level API which operates at the process level. It runs unix processes with strong guarantees of isolation and repeatability across servers.
Docker is an open-source engine which automates the deployment of applications as highly portable, self-sufficient containers.
Docker is a great building block for automating distributed systems: large-scale web deployments, database clusters, continuous deployment systems, private PaaS, service-oriented architectures, etc.
Docker containers are both *hardware-agnostic* and *platform-agnostic*. This means that they can run anywhere, from your
laptop to the largest EC2 compute instance and everything in between - and they don't require that you use a particular
language, framework or packaging system. That makes them great building blocks for deploying and scaling web apps, databases
and backend services without depending on a particular stack or provider.
![Docker L](docs/sources/static_files/lego_docker.jpg "Docker")
Docker is an open-source implementation of the deployment engine which powers [dotCloud](http://dotcloud.com), a popular Platform-as-a-Service.
It benefits directly from the experience accumulated over several years of large-scale operation and support of hundreds of thousands
of applications and databases.
* *Heterogeneous payloads*: any combination of binaries, libraries, configuration files, scripts, virtualenvs, jars, gems, tarballs, you name it. No more juggling between domain-specific tools. Docker can deploy and run them all.
## Better than VMs
* *Any server*: docker can run on any x64 machine with a modern linux kernel - whether it's a laptop, a bare metal server or a VM. This makes it perfect for multi-cloud deployments.
A common method for distributing applications and sandbox their execution is to use virtual machines, or VMs. Typical VM formats
are VMWare's vmdk, Oracle Virtualbox's vdi, and Amazon EC2's ami. In theory these formats should allow every developer to
automatically package their application into a "machine" for easy distribution and deployment. In practice, that almost never
happens, for a few reasons:
* *Isolation*: docker isolates processes from each other and from the underlying host, using lightweight containers.
* *Size*: VMs are very large which makes them impractical to store and transfer.
* *Performance*: running VMs consumes significant CPU and memory, which makes them impractical in many scenarios, for example local development of multi-tier applications, and
large-scale deployment of cpu and memory-intensive applications on large numbers of machines.
* *Portability*: competing VM environments don't play well with each other. Although conversion tools do exist, they are limited and add even more overhead.
* *Hardware-centric*: VMs were designed with machine operators in mind, not software developers. As a result, they offer very limited tooling for what developers need most:
building, testing and running their software. For example, VMs offer no facilities for application versioning, monitoring, configuration, logging or service discovery.
* *Repeatability*: because containers are isolated in their own filesystem, they behave the same regardless of where, when, and alongside what they run.
By contrast, Docker relies on a different sandboxing method known as *containerization*. Unlike traditional virtualization,
containerization takes place at the kernel level. Most modern operating system kernels now support the primitives necessary
for containerization, including Linux with [openvz](http://openvz.org), [vserver](http://linux-vserver.org) and more recently [lxc](http://lxc.sourceforge.net),
Solaris with [zones](http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E29024/preface-1.html#scrolltoc) and FreeBSD with [Jails](http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/jails.html).
Docker builds on top of these low-level primitives to offer developers a portable format and runtime environment that solves
all 4 problems. Docker containers are small (and their transfer can be optimized with layers), they have basically zero memory and cpu overhead,
the are completely portable and are designed from the ground up with an application-centric design.
The best part: because docker operates at the OS level, it can still be run inside a VM!
## Plays well with others
Docker does not require that you buy into a particular programming language, framework, packaging system or configuration language.
Is your application a unix process? Does it use files, tcp connections, environment variables, standard unix streams and command-line
arguments as inputs and outputs? Then docker can run it.
Can your application's build be expressed a sequence of such commands? Then docker can build it.
Notable features
-----------------
## Escape dependency hell
* Filesystem isolation: each process container runs in a completely separate root filesystem.
A common problem for developers is the difficulty of managing all their application's dependencies in a simple and automated way.
* Resource isolation: system resources like cpu and memory can be allocated differently to each process container, using cgroups.
This is usually difficult for several reasons:
* Network isolation: each process container runs in its own network namespace, with a virtual interface and IP address of its own.
* *Cross-platform dependencies*. Modern applications often depend on a combination of system libraries and binaries, language-specific packages, framework-specific modules,
internal components developed for another project, etc. These dependencies live in different "worlds" and require different tools - these tools typically don't work
well with each other, requiring awkward custom integrations.
* Copy-on-write: root filesystems are created using copy-on-write, which makes deployment extremely fast, memory-cheap and disk-cheap.
* Conflicting dependencies. Different applications may depend on different versions of the same dependency. Packaging tools handle these situations with various degrees of ease -
but they all handle them in different and incompatible ways, which again forces the developer to do extra work.
* Custom dependencies. A developer may need to prepare a custom version of his application's dependency. Some packaging systems can handle custom versions of a dependency,
others can't - and all of them handle it differently.
* Logging: the standard streams (stdout/stderr/stdin) of each process container are collected and logged for real-time or batch retrieval.
* Change management: changes to a container's filesystem can be committed into a new image and re-used to create more containers. No templating or manual configuration required.
Docker solves dependency hell by giving the developer a simple way to express *all* his application's dependencies in one place,
and streamline the process of assembling them. If this makes you think of [XKCD 927](http://xkcd.com/927/), don't worry. Docker doesn't
*replace* your favorite packaging systems. It simply orchestrates their use in a simple and repeatable way. How does it do that? With layers.
Docker defines a build as running a sequence unix commands, one after the other, in the same container. Build commands modify the contents of the container
(usually by installing new files on the filesystem), the next command modifies it some more, etc. Since each build command inherits the result of the previous
commands, the *order* in which the commands are executed expresses *dependencies*.
Here's a typical docker build process:
```bash
from ubuntu:12.10
run apt-get update
run apt-get install python
run apt-get install python-pip
run pip install django
run apt-get install curl
run curl http://github.com/shykes/helloflask/helloflask/master.tar.gz | tar -zxv
run cd master && pip install -r requirements.txt
```
Note that Docker doesn't care *how* dependencies are built - as long as they can be built by running a unix command in a container.
* Interactive shell: docker can allocate a pseudo-tty and attach to the standard input of any container, for example to run a throwaway interactive shell.
Install instructions
==================