Docker is a cool idea and open-source product, that seems to be taking the tech community by storm. Wired will tell you why it is cool in a story titled The Man Who Built a Computer the Size of the Internet.
The short version goes: Docker is a way to deploy and move applications with dependencies between Linux servers, using a container concept. The idea is similar to how applications are installed on a Mac, i.e. "everything in a single package".
There are a number of supporting and related technologies, which I will now list:
- Google Borg/Apache Mesos are a related technologies, and perhaps Borg is the original rolemodel for Docker. Borg is apparently being replaced by a new system codenamed Omega (video). According to a Wired Story, it influenced Twitter to develop Mesos (originally developed by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley), now Apache Mesos, to do a similar thing as Borg. It might be fair to say that Docker is an easy version of Borg/Mesos/Omega, for non-geniuses (people generally hired by Google, Twitter etc).
- CoreOS is a supporting technology, an OS designed for deploying containers such as Docker. As mentioned in Wired, the project is based on Google’s ChromeOS. According to the website of this operating system, CoreOS is "Linux kernel + systemd. That's about it."
This is it for now about Docker. Just heard about it a few hours ago in an email from a friend and supervisor.