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CHAPTER 1 What Are Containers? 3 These materials are © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. What Are Containers? C ontainers aren't new. In fact, today's container services can be traced way back to the early days of Unix's chroot opera- tion. Until recently, the main problems with containers have been portability and management, problems that were addressed by the introduction of Docker to the market. In this chapter, I explain how the modern container market got its start and how current market solutions have made containers a viable and increasingly popular option in today's enterprise IT market. The Evolution of Containers Containers have a long and storied history, but each iteration has in common the idea that there needs to be some level of abstrac- tion in order for there to be efficiency and security in workload management. However, unlike virtualization, which provides abstraction at the hardware level, containers operate at the oper- ating system (OS) level. As a result, some really interesting things happen, which I fill you in on later. For now, let's jump in the time machine and trek back to the groovy disco days of the 1970s and speed through to the techno era of the 2000s and beyond. Chapter 1 IN THIS CHAPTER » Seeing how the current container market came into existence » Comparing and contrasting containers with virtualization and bare-metal workload deployments » Identifying how containers support a variety of legacy and modern application needs