Docker uses a client-server architecture. The docker CLI is the client. It sends each command over a REST API to the Docker daemon, dockerd, which builds, runs and distributes containers.
Its main components:
- The Docker client is the command-line interface, and it can talk to a local or remote daemon.
- The Docker daemon is a background service that manages containers, images and networks.
- An image is a read-only template used to create containers.
- A container is a running instance of an image.
- A registry stores images. Docker Hub is the default public registry, and you can also run a private one.
- Docker Engine is the complete platform: the daemon, its REST API and the CLI.
Below the daemon, containerd manages each container's lifecycle, and it uses runc to create the container itself.
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