What do containers provide in a Docker environment?

Containers in a Docker environment provide isolated processes with their own file systems, which is a fundamental characteristic of containerization technology. Each container runs a completely independent instance of an application along with all its dependencies and libraries, isolated from other containers. This means that an application running inside a container cannot interfere with other containers or the host system, even though they may share the same operating system kernel.

The isolation ensures that different applications can run simultaneously on the same host machine without affecting one another, which greatly simplifies deployment and scaling. Furthermore, since each container has its own file system, developers can ensure that the software behaves the same way in different environments, from development to production.

This model is different from a virtualized server environment, which entails running multiple operating systems on a single physical server, whereas containers share the same OS kernel. Likewise, containers do not have direct access to the physical hardware resources in the same way virtual machines do. Additionally, containers are typically not designed to provide a graphical user interface, but rather to run backend applications or services.