Docker is a powerful platform for managing lightweight containers. In plainer English, Docker provides you with tools to run all of your system’s components as discrete, fast, interoperable services. Each service can be provided with the environment it needs to do its job (a database service might require MariaDB, for example) often with little or no provisioning required. Together, these services can be used to deploy a reusable tool, a quick demo, a development environment, or a full production-ready stack. The crucial selling point of Docker is that each container packages up an entire system’s worth of dependencies, libraries, and components into a self-contained and easily distributable form.