Namespaces

The technical definition of Namespaces – “A namespace wraps a global system resource in an abstraction that makes it appear to the processes within the namespace that they have their own isolated instance of the global resource. Changes to the global resource are visible to other processes that are members of the namespace but are invisible to other processes.”

Now simpler terms Namespaces are a way, or a mechanism used to wrap any global system resource such that the processes that are running within the namespace thinks that they have their own isolated instance of that resource, and they cannot see things happening outside of their own instance. Its just like the processes do not know what’s happening outside the namespace, they are only worried about what’s confined inside that particular namespace.

For example, there is a namespace called PID, the full form is Process ID namespace. The PID namespace is isolated within a container such that within the PID namespace, the process you will run will appear to be process ID number one even though there may be tons of other processes running on the host. From inside the container, we don’t know anything about those host processes, and we essentially think that we are the only thing running in this system.

Understanding the Docker Desktop Architecture and Linux Building Block for Containers

In this article we are going to do a technology deep dive and start understanding the foundational Linux kernel features that software like Docker is using to make the containers work and provide those isolated environments that we all use. then towards the end of this section, we’ll also take a look at the docker system architecture.

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The building blocks of containers

There are three technologies that make up the core of a container....

Namespaces

The technical definition of Namespaces – “A namespace wraps a global system resource in an abstraction that makes it appear to the processes within the namespace that they have their own isolated instance of the global resource. Changes to the global resource are visible to other processes that are members of the namespace but are invisible to other processes.”...

C groups or Control groups

The technical definition of Control groups – “a Linux kernel feature which allow processes to be organized into hierarchical groups whose usage of various types of resources can then be limited and monitored.”...

Union Mount Filesystems (OverlayFS)

The Technical definition of Union Mount Filesystems – “Union Mount Filesystems (overlayfs) allows files and directories of separate file systems, known as branches, to be transparently overlaid, forming a single coherent file system. Contents of directories which have the same path within the merged branches will be seen together in a single merged directory, within the new virtual filesystem.”...

Docker Desktop Architecture

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Docker Desktop walkthrough

In this section we will go through the Docker Desktop application and understand how to use it to work with containers. Firstly you can download Docker Desktop from the Docker official website. You will automatically get Docker upon installing the Docker Desktop....

Conclusion

We started out with the building blocks of containers which are Namespaces, Control groups and Union file systems. In summary, Namespaces are mechanism used to wrap any global system resource such that the processes that are running within the namespace thinks that they have their own isolated instance of that resource. Control groups are also similar to this but we use control groups for explicitly giving the control of certain resources to the processes....

FAQs on Docker Desktop Architecture and Linux Building Block for Containers

1. Is Docker Engine Same as Docker Desktop?...

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