Containers

Containers provide portability, consistency, and are used for packaging, deploying, and running cloud-native data science applications.

Docker is the most popular virtualization environment to deliver software in containers. Containers bundle their own software, libraries and configuration files and are isolated from one another. Containers are the run-time environments or instances defined by container images.

Docker is well supported by the R community, the Rocker project provides different base images for R.

In this section we will review how to containerize a Shiny application, first reviewing the basics of working with Docker, than we'll see how to create a Docker image with a Shiny app.