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Docker vs LXC: What are the differences?
What is Docker? Enterprise Container Platform for High-Velocity Innovation. The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere.
What is LXC? Linux containers. LXC is a userspace interface for the Linux kernel containment features. Through a powerful API and simple tools, it lets Linux users easily create and manage system or application containers.
Docker and LXC belong to "Virtual Machine Platforms & Containers" category of the tech stack.
Docker and LXC are both open source tools. It seems that Docker with 54K GitHub stars and 15.6K forks on GitHub has more adoption than LXC with 2.66K GitHub stars and 797 GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Docker has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3523 company stacks & 3442 developers stacks; compared to LXC, which is listed in 11 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.
lxd/lxc and Docker aren't congruent so this comparison needs a more detailed look; but in short I can say: the lxd-integrated administration of storage including zfs with its snapshot capabilities as well as the system container (multi-process) approach of lxc vs. the limited single-process container approach of Docker is the main reason I chose lxd over Docker.
Pros of Docker
- Rapid integration and build up821
- Isolation688
- Open source517
- Testability and reproducibility504
- Lightweight459
- Standardization217
- Scalable182
- Upgrading / downgrading / application versions105
- Security86
- Private paas environments84
- Portability33
- Limit resource usage25
- I love the way docker has changed virtualization15
- Game changer15
- Fast12
- Concurrency11
- Docker's Compose tools7
- Fast and Portable4
- Easy setup4
- Because its fun4
- Makes shipping to production very simple3
- It's dope2
- Highly useful1
- MacOS support FAKE1
- Its cool1
- Docker hub for the FTW1
- Very easy to setup integrate and build1
- Package the environment with the application1
- Does a nice job hogging memory1
- Open source and highly configurable1
- Simplicity, isolation, resource effective1
Pros of LXC
- Lightweight4
- Simple and powerful3
- Easy to use3
- Good security2
- LGPL2
- Reliable1
- Trusted1
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Cons of Docker
- New versions == broken features7
- Documentation not always in sync4
- Moves quickly3
- Unreliable networking3
Cons of LXC
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What is Docker?
What is LXC?
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Blog Posts
Docker is the new kid on the block disrupting virtualization nowadays. You're able to save up to 70% of your development cost on AWS (or any other cloud) switching to Docker. For example instead of paying for many small VMs you can spin up a large one with many Docker containers to drastically lower your cost. That alone is only one of the reasons why Docker is the future and it's not even the best feature: isolation, testability, reproducibility, standardization, security, and upgrading / downgrading / application versions to name a few. You can spin up 1000's of Docker containers on an ordinary Laptop, but you would have trouble spinning up 100's of VMs. If you haven't already checked out Docker you're missing out on a huge opportunity to join the movement that will change development/production environments forever
The support for macOS is a fake.
I can't work with docker in macOS because de network and comunications with the container don't works correctly.
Currently experimenting. The idea is to isolate any services where I'm not confident yet in their security/quality. The hope is that if there is an exploit in a given service that an attacker won't be able break out of the docker container and cause damage to my systems.
An example of a service I would isolate in a docker container would be a minecraft browser map application I use. I don't know who wrote it, I don't know who's vetting it, I don't know the source code. I would feel a lot better putting this in a container before I expose it to the internet.
I believe I will follow this process for anything that's not properly maintained (not in an trusted apt-repo or some other sort of confidence)
We are testing out docker at the moment, building images from successful staging builds for all our APIs. Since we operate in a SOA (not quite microservices), developers have a dockerfile that they can run to build the entirety of our api infrastructure on their machines. We use the successful builds from staging to power these instances allowing them to do some more manual integration testing across systems.
Each component of the app was launched in a separate container, so that they wouldn't have to share resources: the front end in one, the back end in another, a third for celery, a fourth for celery-beat, and a fifth for RabbitMQ. Actually, we ended up running four front-end containers and eight back-end, due to load constraints.
Linux containers are so much more lightweight than VMs which is quite important for my limited budget. However, Docker has much more support and tooling for it unlike LXC, hence why I use it. rkt is interesting, although I will probably stick with Docker due to being more widespread.