With the introduction done, we can now discuss some fun stuff: making containers super fast. Optimizing up or downstream the bottleneck won’t have an effect on the end user, or the consumer, of the system.īe data driven. Gathering hard evidence (numbers) about system behavior before and after you run any performance analysis is essential. Optimize the bottleneck. Take into account where your bottleneck is and optimize only at that point. When it comes to performance improvements, stick to the following guidelines: Importantly though, these cached layers are additive, which means you can only add to them (more on this later). This means, among other things, as you build a Docker image (as part of your Dockerfile) it’s cached for performance. You need to think about what resources the host has, and how it’s sharing these with the containers.Ĭontainers are built from layers. Containers use the union file system. Some key points to remember about containers:Ĭontainers (nearly always) have hosts. Containers need machines to run on, but don’t expect them to run optimally out of the box. Containers will always run predictably-no matter where you choose to execute them-as isolated and protected processes. Simply put, Docker containers are a way of packaging and distributing software with simple instructions to run.
It’s important to understand the nuances of how Docker works so we can ensure we’re leveraging its powerful features.
