If we go for a moment back to what we have learned about containers in Chapter 3, Working with Containers, then we have this: the filesystem of each container when started is made up of the immutable layers of the underlying image plus a writable container layer specific to this very container. All changes that the processes running inside the container make to the filesystem will be persisted in this container layer. Once the container is stopped and removed from the system, the corresponding container layer is deleted from the system and irreversibly lost.
Some applications, such as databases running in containers, need to persist their data beyond the lifetime of the container. In this case they can use volumes. To make things a bit more explicit let's look at a concrete sample. MongoDB is a popular open source document database. Many developers use MongoDB as a storage service for their applications. The maintainers of MongoDB have created an image and published...