What is Docker?

Today I will be sharing the fundamentals of Docker and examining Bind Mounts and Volumes with the goal of helping you understand how these work.

Docker is a tool that containerizes your applications, providing loose isolation between your application and the host machine. Hence, when running your application in a container, its desired behavior does not depend on your host machine.

Docker containers provide you with a writable layer on top to make changes to your running container. But these changes are bound to the container’s lifecycle. If the container is deleted (not stopped), you lose your changes.

Let’s take a hypothetical scenario where you are running a database (SQL) in a container (though I believe it is not a good idea to run stateful applications in a container) without any Volumes or Bind Mounts attached. You create some tables and add some rows to them.

But, for some reason, you need to delete this container. As soon as the container is deleted, all your tables and their corresponding data are lost. Thankfully, Docker provides us with a couple of solutions to persist your data even if the container is deleted. The two possible ways to persist your data are:

>Bind Mounts

>Volumes

Though both methods are similar, there is a slight difference. Docker manages Volumes and is usually not affected by other processes running on the same host. In contrast, Bind Mounts are just directories on the host file system and may be modified by other processes other than docker. But the base similarity is that the lifecycle of both solutions does not depend on the container’s lifecycle.

It is possible to confuse the two, so we’ll try to make it clear with an example for both methods:

Please note: You should have installed docker on your machine if you want to follow along with the activity and commands in the blog. I will be using Docker Desktop on a Windows machine.

Let’s begin…

A Bind Mount is a storage area (file/directory) on your local machine available inside your container. So any changes…

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