Docker refers to a tool which has been primarily designed for benefitting both system administrators and developers. For the system administrators, it gives them the flexibility they need and lowers the numbers of systems required due to its low overhead costs and small footprint. For the developers, Docker is useful because they can concentrate on writing codes without being concerned about systems which these will run on eventually. So, Docker is becoming very popular as a cost-friendly and cycle-shrinking open source tool. But businesses need to weigh the pros and cons first before casting their vote in favor of this tool.

This tool is yet to develop and is currently in a stage of infancy. This is why it is important for businesses to evaluate its advantages to see if it will guarantee cost-efficiency. Businesses must also decide on the framework they need to orchestrate and handle a container environment. So, they must have proper insights into which containers are currently running, containers that communicate with each other etc.

• Among the many advantages that Docker offers, the primary one is that there is no need for a VM; so, you will not need to bear costs for guest operating system and hypervisor resources. The same OS is used for running all containers and this implies that the memory, CPU and the disk space is better utilized.

• Docker is open source and capable of running on all the key Linux systems and Microsoft-backed operating systems. These are also scalable and it is possible to scale them up and down within minutes. At the same time, it is important to understand that every application does not need this degree or scalability or fast deployments. For instance, an application like Exchange will not witness too many fluctuating demands but an ecommerce store may need to use Docker as this site will face fluctuation in demands.

• VMs will guarantee high isolation because resources for these are being virtualized through hypervisors. Docker, on the other hand, provides less isolation because the OS is shared by many containers. So, crashes and malware can transfer from a container to the next.

• The Docker tool is not suitable for every application because the Docker container lacks the benefit of grouping important applications in a single container. So, only selected applications will be able to run seamlessly in such an environment. The applications which are likely to benefit are those which run on multiple clouds server, applications which deploy micro services and those that need auto-scaling to handle sudden demand surges.

Virtualization will not be replaced by Docker; it is a tool that is going to be used mainly for developing applications and this is why it is necessary for the operations team to assess it properly before they deploy it. The idea behind DevOps is to improve the speed and quality with which innovative solutions are being offered. Docker’s power to make the delivery of applications easier and its ability to improve collaboration between operations and development is conducive to the DevOps vision. At the same time, the operations personnel need to be clear about how to use this technology; they are not fully aware of the threats it may pose. Since Docker is comparatively new for the administrators, businesses do not possess the skills and expertise needed to use it to their business advantage.

Higher delivery speed and lower change-based outages are the main criteria for determining business value of such tools. Docker ensures this by making sure that there is no mismatch between development and production. Since deployment speed is very high, environments that are being rapidly scaled up should also be scaled down and the retired containers should be eliminated to ensure that performance does not get affected because of over-usage of hardware. For businesses to realize when this has to happen there must be proper capacity management solutions.

To sum up, Docker does not have monitoring tools and this makes performance monitoring of applications a challenging task. There is no capacity management tool also and managing environments therefore becomes hard. So, when Docker is used heavily, there may be resultant performance related problems.