Let’s take a look at the list of Docker’s technical features, and check which ones are provided by LXC and which ones aren’t.

Features:

1) Filesystem isolation: each process container runs in a completely separate root filesystem.

Provided with plain LXC.

2) Resource isolation: system resources like cpu and memory can be allocated differently to each process container, using cgroups.

Provided with plain LXC.

3) Network isolation: each process container runs in its own network namespace, with a virtual interface and IP address of its own.

Provided with plain LXC.

4) Copy-on-write: root filesystems are created using copy-on-write, which makes deployment extremely fast, memory-cheap and disk-cheap.

This is provided by AUFS, a union filesystem that Docker depends on. You could set up AUFS yourself manually with LXC, but Docker uses it as a standard.

5) Logging: the standard streams (stdout/stderr/stdin) of each process container is collected and logged for real-time or batch retrieval.

Docker provides this.

6) Change management: changes to a container’s filesystem can be committed into a new image and re-used to create more containers. No templating or manual configuration required.

“Templating or manual configuration” is a reference to LXC, where you would need to learn about both of these things. Docker allows you to treat containers in the way that you’re used to treating virtual machines, without learning about LXC configuration.

7) Interactive shell: docker can allocate a pseudo-tty and attach to the standard input of any container, for example to run a throwaway interactive shell.

LXC already provides this.

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I only just started learning about LXC and Docker, so I’d welcome any corrections or better answers.