The concept of containers in IT is synonymous to the concept of containers used in the transportation sector. The basic purpose of containers is to carry or port items from source to destination.

Extending the same analogy, containers in IT operate on this basic purpose to port software from one server to another safely and securely. Moving an application from development server to QA (test) server and to production server is usually associated with multiple complexities, such as preparing infrastructure environment checklists, validating the compliers, libraries, runtime dependencies, and so on. The container concept is to ensure that it carries along with it the ecosystem required for an application to run from one bare-metal system to another. A container in that sense is self-sufficient, with all the requisite components, and the environment for the application to run on any server is installed. A container image is a standalone executable package, an abstraction that packages...