Intro
Recently I’ve seen the question pop up a lot: Do you use your native operating system for hacking or a VM? The answer might surprise you, dear hacker, I use neither. What I use are containers.
What is docker?
Docker enables you to separate your applications from your infrastructures. It consists of a daemon that manages several components of the Docker ecosystem. This consists of:
- Network components
- Containers
- Images
- Data volumes for storage
The daemon manages these components via a REST API. We can use a docker client to communicate with the daemon, which does all the heavy lifting for us. Keen-eyed readers might notice that this resembles a client-server architecture and they would be right, that’s exactly what docker is trying to implement.
The Docker client and daemon CAN run on the same server but they don’t have to.
Docker components
Before we go any further it’s important we go over some terms. These terms are docker-specific and will help us understand the architecture and how we can use docker.
Daemon
The daemon takes input from the docker client. When docker users run a command like “docker run”, it gets sent from the client to the daemon which carries them out. The daemon does this using the docker API.
A docker daemon can also communicate with other daemons on the same server or on the network.
Docker Client
This is the primary way that docker users can use to communicate with the daemon.
The docker client can communicate with more than 1 daemon.
Docker registry
Linux users and programmers will undoubtedly have heard of repositories. For those of you who have not, a repository is a collection of code or applications that we can use to download or upload…
