Today, Amazon Web Services announced the availability of Docker through their automated deployment tool Elastic BeansTalk.

For those unfamiliar to docker, it’s a container system that runs inside Linux and allows you to isolate resources, deployments and setups.

Imagine that you can create a container with all the dependences that your app needs, and run this container in any Linux distribution enabled to run docker. Or on an Mac with Docker installed*. This simplifies the setup of development environments a lot, and if properly setup, it allows a DevOps team to easily deploy new releases to test or even production environments (although the Docker site states that docker should not be used in production environments… yet)

From my sysadmin point of view it allows me to deploy applications to different cloud providers, isolating the IaaS layer. I just have to create a docker image with my application installed and deploy it on whatever provider that gives me access to a linux box.

I invite you to test it and let me know if it helps you simplify your work or approach it on a more efficient way.

To get started with docker go to: http://docs.docker.io/introduction/working-with-docker/

To learn more about Amazon Web Services + Docker check the following video:

* to run on Mac or Windows Docker installs a lightweight VM… BUT, it stills simplifies the job.