“But it works on my machine!” That is an excuse too often overheard in conversations between developers and operations teams. Even with sophisticated tooling, virtually unlimited computing capacity in the cloud, and advanced continuous integration workflows, the differences between developing applications locally and running them in production remains a persistent source of bugs and other problems. Dev and ops teams often turn to virtual machines, pre-built images, and/or configuration management systems like and to achieve better parity with Linux-based production environments and Mac or Windows development environments. All those approaches can help, but the problems can still persist. Fortunately, the new offers an opportunity to create a more resilient local environment that better mirrors production. MacOS and Windows have traditionally not supported the Linux-based container technology that powers Docker, but the latest release of Docker for Mac and Windows now makes it easier to get started creating and running containers in those environments with less overhead. Let’s put a simple Node.js application in a Docker container as an example.

Less fragile developer environments with Docker containers Developer workstations are fragile. Upgrading the operating system, botched package installs, conflicting dependencies, and the need to use multiple programming language runtimes remains a persistent source of frustration for developers. Many language-specific tools have been built to manage this complexity, including for Python, for Ruby, and for Java.

Docker, however, presents an elegant new alternative. Download os x yosemite for windows 7 2. Containers, like virtual machines, offer a way to isolate the complex dependencies applications require from the host operating system and other applications. Unlike VMs, containers are less resource intensive and usually take only seconds to start.

Docker became a developer darling by combining Linux container technology with a specialized file system and command-line interface that also runs on Mac and Windows with the help of a Linux virtual machine. The additional requirements needed to run Docker on non-Linux environments have been simplified in the latest beta release of Docker’s software, making it easier to work with. Once installed, Docker images, often available for popular open-source projects from the, are used to instantiate running containers that execute application code. (Understanding the difference between a container and image is particularly important—more information is available on the.).

On our comparison page, it is simple to evaluate the tool, pricing conditions, available plans, and more details of Parallels RAS and Docker. You can assess their score (8.7 for Parallels RAS vs. 9.4 for Docker) and user satisfaction level (100% for Parallels RAS vs. 98% for Docker).